They sometimes say a gaffe is when a politician screws up and tells the truth.

By that token, journalistic malfeasance is when an MSM outlet accidentally doesn’t spin things in favor of Democrats.

The leftysphere was all afroth over this story in USA Today claiming that my native North Dakota was the most corrupt state in the union.

Oh, yes – they’re spinning for Illinois’ famously-corrupt Democrats:

On a per-capita basis, however, Illinois ranks 18th for the number of public corruption convictions the federal government has won from 1998 through 2007, according to a USA TODAY analysis of Department of Justice statistics.

But see if you can juuuuuuuust maybe find the clinker in USA Today’s story. I’ll provide emphasis, for those of you who get your news from the Minnesoros “Independent”:

The analysis does not include corruption cases handled by state law enforcement and it considers only convictions. Corruption may run more rampant in some states but go undetected.

Gosh. D’ya think? Places that convict fewer corrupt pols maybe more corrupt than ones that do?

It’s mildly sobering to see that Wonkette would seem to be the only leftyblog that twigged to the simple fact that, while the story claims North Dakota is the most corrupt, the metrics indicate that my reliably Republican home state is the most anti-corruption state:

However, one arrives at this metric by dividing the number of political corruption convictions in the past ten years by the number of residents. Thus, low-population states with normal-sized governments are disproportionately “corrupt,” as evidenced by the shameful badge of corruption affixed to neighboring South Dakota and Montana. Meanwhile, the truly corrupt states (Rhode Island, anyone?) emerge a shade better, because they never bother to arrest, or god forbid convict, their political criminals. Instead, they elect them Mayor of Providence.

KB notes:

There are international measures, most commonly used being the Transparency International rankings of bribe payers and corruption perceptions…Micro-level studies seemed to be more persuasive. I would argue that corruption is higher in places where the top pay of the private sector is greatest, which is not inconsiderable in Chicago.

While the North Dakota legislature makes $5 a day during its biennial session (no raises since the 1890’s), government work is actually a decent living in NoDak, where the general standard of living really isn’t all that high.

As usual, leftyblogs – great job. Just great!

Oh, the USA Today completes the leftymedia trifecta, adding a little ofay victimology (emphasis added):

Michael Johnston is a political science professor at Colgate University in New York — which is ranked just after Illinois for corruption convictions. Johnston, who has studied political corruption for 30 years, said places such as Illinois gain a bad reputation that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“Expectations build up … and you replicate those expectations when you get to the top of the ladder,” Johnston said. “It gets repeated.”

“Blogojevich is a victim! He couldn’t help himself! It was expected of him!”

Sorry, USA Today. You call it “self-fulfilling prophecy”. We call it “culture of corruption”.

When I grew up, “Heroes” were people like…:

• Ernest Shackleton: In 1916, Shackleton was on an Antarctic expedition when his ship, HMS Endurance, was trapped, and then crushed, in pack ice.  There was no radio on the Endurance, so the crew of twenty-odd men were as on their own as could be, sort of like Gilligan’s Island, except stuck on an ice floe instead of a tropical paradise.  Shackelton managed to keep his entire crew alive on the ice (and then on a barren plug of rock in the South Atlantic, to which they rowed and sailed in open lifeboats for several days) for two years, living on penguins and seal meat.  And when after those two years the crew was fading fast, he led three other men in a canvas-covered lifeboat with a jury-rigged sail on an 800-mile voyage, across a South Atlantic that makes the Barents Sea in Dangerous Catch look like Lake Calhoun during a summer squall, using simple hand-held navigational instruments, to South Georgia Island, which with its tiny whaling station was the nearest civilization.  An error of so much as a single degree in navigating in the storm in the wet boat with the sextant, chronometer and map would have left the men hopelessly lost – and yet they found South Georgia.  And then climbed a mountain across the middle of the island to get help.  That’s a hero.
• Stanislaus Schmajzner:  A Jewish teenager who’d been arrested by the Nazis, Schmajzner was taken to the Sobibor extermination camp (like Auschwitz, only less famous).  There, he lied about having a trade, falsely claiming to be a cobbler, a lie that saved his life (the German guards at the camp needed a cobbler; Jews without needed trades went to the gas chambers).  The inmates, watching the slaughter around them (over a quarter of a million died at Sobibor) realized that the only hope for any of them to die with dignity, much less survive, was to rise up, try to kill their guards and, if they survived, make a run for the woods.  Schmajzner showed an ingenuity at camouflage and smuggling (among many other of the inmates in on the plot) that was of immense help to the Jews.  Finally, the Jews launched their rebellion, killing enough guards to make it through the gate (as the surviving guards machine-gunned them without mercy).  Perhaps a couple of hundred made it to the woods; maybe thirty, including Schmajzner, survived the war.  Schmajzher emigrated to Brazil, eventually, but spent the rest of his life educating people about the Holocaust.  That’s a hero.
• Donald Ruhl:  Donald Who?  Sadly, that’s right.  Donald Ruhl was a 21 year old Private First Class in the US Marines from Columbus, Montana.  He was a combat veteran – he’d fought in the brutal compaign on Bougainville, earlier in the war.  He landed with the rest of the 28th Marine Regiment (Fifth Marine Division) on Iwo Jima in the winter of 1945.  On the second day of the battle, on the approaches to Mount Suribachi…well, I’ll let his Congressional Medal of Honor citation do the talking:  “[Ruhl] crawled with his platoon guide to the top of a Japanese bunker to bring fire to bear on enemy troops located on the far side of the bunker, suddenly a hostile grenade landed between the two Marines. Instantly Private First Class Ruhl called a warning to his fellow Marine and dived on the deadly missile, absorbing the full impact of the shattering explosion in his own body and protecting all within range from the danger of flying fragments although he might easily have dropped from his position on the edge of the bunker to the ground below.”  That, too, is a hero.

Those, I believe, are heroes.

Grace Kelly – who helped make the old MNBlue such a disgrace that it had to merge with Joe Bodell’s bad-but-not-quite-as-disgraceful Minnesota Campaign Report to form the Minnesota “Progressive” Project blog, writes:

Around this holiday season, I like to say “Thank You” to people who serve unnoticed. The Democratic-Farmer-Labor party has many people who work so hard to create better communities and better government. This is mostly volunteer work with a few underpaid jobs.These are the everyday heroes!

That sure brings “meaning” to the term “everyday heroes”. 

Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci – who, by Grace’s generous definition of “hero” certainly is one, except that he’s not a DFLer – grants these heroes what is, for heroes in our society (at least, the ones that don’t dash into burning buildings to save others, or volunteer to leave their families for a year to defend Code Pink from being rounded up and beheaded) the ultimate recognition; being immortalized in one of those Budweier “Real American Heroes” spots. 

Go read it.  It’s enough to make you want…

…to…

…sing:

DEEP THROATED NARRATOR: Shot In The Dark presents…Real DFL Heroes

OVERWROUGHT MULLETED SINGER: ♫ Real DFL heeeeroooooes ♫

NARRATOR: Today we salute YOU, Mr. Paid Leftyblogger!!

OMS: ♫ Mizz Anonymously-Paid Leftyblogger!!♫

NARRATOR: While the rest of the world goes on with their lives, you devote yourself to the eternal quest; finding an original way to try to photoshop Michele Bachmann…

OMS: ♫ “Ain’t that woman cra-zeee?”♫

NARRATOR: When questioned about your funding, you respond the way  your group always has; “Soros?  Who’s George Soros?”

OMS: ♫ Never heaaard of him!♫

NARRATOR: But at the end of the day, you’re the one who Twin Cities lefties can count on to break the monopoly of the conservative Star/Tribune, and tell the truth!

OMS: ♫ Pawlenty lied and people died! ♫

NARRATOR: So pop open a Corona, Mister Anonymously-Paid Leftyblogger! Because at the end of the day, when Media Matters says “Jump”, someone has to answer “Off What?”

OMS: ♫ Mister Anonymously-Paid Leftyblogger♫

NARRATOR: Shot In The Dark, Saint Paul, Minnesota.

[Hee Haw on] Saaaa-LUTE![/Hee Haw off].

Not a dry eye in the place, I tells ya.

Barack Obama is denying involvement in the Senate Seat Auction perpetrated by Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois.

…and I believe him. Sort of.

I also believe that Barack knows this sort of thing runs rampant in Chicago. I believe Barack Obama had to know this interchange would ensue despite his lack of direct involvement. This is in no way proof of Obama’s involvement. At best, a thin and dotted line can be drawn based on the Governor’s expectation that Barack Obama would become involved vis a vis his influence, if not financially. From the wiretaps…

The governor discusses with his staff the possibility of getting a high-paying position with an organization called “Change to Win,” connected to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). He would take the seat after resigning as governor. A “three-way deal” is discussed. He would choose the person they believe is Mr. Obama’s preferred candidate — “Senate Candidate 1″ — and the President-elect, they said, would find a way to influence someone to give him the Change to Win post.

The governor knows that Mr. Obama wants “Senate Candidate 1″ for the seat but complains “they’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation.” In another call, the governor asks advisers if they think Mr. Obama can get Warren Buffet and others to put up $10 to $15 million for a foundation he could head.

If this drama were playing out in Arizona with Senator McCain’s Senate Seat, the media would be going ballistic over this fiasco. In Illinois, this is de rigeur, as evidenced by the FBI initiating surveillance in October.

We may be in for a series of controversies with an Obama administration as clearly “That One” has suffered from an association problem his entire political career and he may have other debts to pay.

He learned well. Obama is a product of the most corrupt political system in America. He has heretofore exhibited little reluctance to associate with scum if it serves his greater ambitions. Having realized them, he may well regret what represents a clear pattern of poor decision-making. As Momma always said, be careful who you hang out with.

As it stands, the media honeymoon may be over for their lovechild Barack Obama as this stuff makes for great ratings. As more details emerge, we may find the President-Elect in hot water.

…hopefully not.

As much as the GOP would have savored an opportunity like this during the campaign, the economy needs our government’s full attention, even if they haven’t a clue how to fix it. We don’t need another Clintonistic national distraction.

Two bits of news from talk radio that tie into a larger industry-wide trend.

Brain Maloney notes that Citadel Radio – one of the chains of broadcasters that has led the way in trying to jam left-leaning programming down the listeners throats, and largely failing (judging by their stock, which has gone from a solid hold to a penny stock in the past two years), is running the pointless Joe Scarborough and the execrable Mika Brezinski on their flagship station WABC in New York.

Maloney:

In fact, the decision to insert MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski into WABC’s midmorning slot is exactly how Citadel – ABC Radio got into this mess in the first place.Since the ill-fated merger of [Citadel and the old ABC Radio], Citadel’s upper management has struggled to grasp news-talk and what drives listenership. Instead of learning more about this highly-successful medium’s audience characteristics, CEO Farid Suleman has compelled stations to comply with a series of increasingly-bizarre programming edicts, of which this is merely the latest.

It’s nothing new, of course.  Since the aftermath of the 2004 elections, a lot of high-power consultants – the ones whom Rush Limbaugh caught by surprise – have been saying “conservative talk is dead”, and doing their best to prove it by killing off the stations they program.

This is manifested in ways small (the ongoing morphing of KSTP-AM into WCCO) and, in WABC’s case, big:

[Suleman’s] latest fiasco debuted yesterday, made possible by the recent removal of longtime WABC honcho Phil Boyce. One longtime major market radio programmer who monitored the broadcast told your Radio Equalizer that it “sounds like a train wreck on the air. Maybe this is the making of a new horror movie: When CEOs Program.” He further called it “just MSNBC on the radio.”

Without a skilled programming coach to guide Joe and Mika, both rank amateurs when it comes to talk radio, the program lacked focus. It skipped around haphazardly between topics and guests, which included MSNBC insiders such as David Gregory and Tom Brokaw.

Perhaps Suleman knows something we don’t.

Perhaps Harry Reid tipped him off that the Fairness Doctrine will not only be re-enacted immediately after inauguration, but enforced brutally, and it’s best to get ahead of the curve by filling your lineup with innocuous center-left talking heads who won’t offend the new regime and its mass of informants (who will be the engine driving the Doctrine).

In a related matter: while KSTP-AM has been floating aimlessly down this road for years, since the departure of Rush Limbaugh and Jason Lewis, programming innocuous hamsters like Willie and Jay, innocuous drive-time sportstalk with Matt Thomas, and mostly-apolitical social-curmudgeon with a thin veneer of “crusty reactionary” Joe Soucheray, who has been doing the same show to the same audience for (counts in his head) around fifteen years.

Now, “TBD” is replacing Mischke in the noon-2pm slot.  Yesterday, TBD was Jim Souhan, sports reporter at the Strib.  It was a bit of deja vu, going back to the days when KSTP seemed to think that any newspaper reporter could run a talk show; Nick Coleman, Catherine Lanpher, Jim Klobuchar and scads of other Strib and PiPress reporters and sportswriters paraded through the studio (including, to be fair, James Lileks).

Deja vu, also, in that it was just plain awful – like most newspaper (and TV) people are when they try talk radio.  It wandered aimlessly.  It skimmed past stories without giving anyone (in the forty-five or so minutes I wasted) a reason to pay it any attention.

It sounded, I thought, like pre-1987 talk radio.

I’m just gonna let that hang there for a while.

NYT argues GM engineered its own downfall

Ten years before Chrysler introduced the world to minivans, General Motors had already developed its own version. Toyota sold the Prius at a loss for years before it became popular while GM leased a fleet of electric EV1s for three years before deciding it would never turn a profit. Honda and Toyota both sold small, efficient vehicles for decades even though their sales were relatively small and profits less than stellar. Meanwhile, GM spent billions to establish Saturn to compete with small import cars, only to let the brand go five years with no new products.

At least that’s the way this New York Times story looks at GM’s recent history.

They should know… 

Tribune (Almost) Toast, New York Times Next?

More startling over the past year has been the collapse of the New York Times (NYT). The New York Times Company has a $400 million debt payment due in five months, and management has not yet explained how it plans to meet this. The company is nearly out of cash, its operations are now burning cash, and its attempts to sell assets have, so far, been unsuccessful.

My my. What ever (sniff sniff) would we do without the New York Times?

I’m bummed to hear that T.D. “Tommy” Mischke has gotten whacked at KSTP-AM.

I’m not, of course, surprised.  More on that below.

David Brauer:

I called Mischke Saturday morning and he was gracious, diplomatic and cautious. “I want to be able to talk about it, but I need a little time before I can,” he said.

No doubt.  Mischke’s career with Hubbard has been a blessing for all of us who’ve loved his show over the years.  But in this day and age it was also a pretty unlikely gift, I think, to Mischke himself.  I have a hunch (an unqualified one, but I’m confident in it) that he knows it.

Brauer gets this part wrong, though.

He began as Don Vogel’s sidekick in 1992…

 Nope.  He started in 1986.  At least, that’s my story, and I’m sticking by it.

———-

Back when I was screening calls for Don Vogel, we had a regular caller – “The Phantom Caller“.  He’d call in and give a different pseudonym, sometimes a couple of times a week, sometimes with a little gap in between.  I quickly figured out his voice; I’d cue Don that I thought the “Phantom Caller” was on the line; Don would go to him quickly; he was a huge fan.  Mischke may have known how many times he left Don in stitches and gasping with laughter on the air; he probably didn’t know how many times he incapacitated all of us in the control room as well.

Tom had some ingenious moments; I have a cassette of some of the great Phantom Caller bits from Vogel’s first go-around at KSTP, and it’s still hilarious stuff, each of them a finely-honed little gem of writing delivered with the kind of voices that Mischke has made famous for the past decade and a half.  The best moment of all?  One blustery, rainy fall day, we took the Vogel show on the road, to a display window in the old “Powers” store in downtown Minneapolis (it’s long gone, of course; it was on one of the blocks where Gaviidae Common sits today, if memory serves).  As I stood outside with a microphone looking for comments from the assembled multitude (which was gratifyingly large for that era of KSTP shows), a guy came dashing up Sixth Street in a yellow unitard with a red cape and a mask.  He plunged into the center of the crowd, saying not a word, but handing out little one-page, handwritten humorous blurbettes – each completely unique.  He handed ’em out until he ran out – maybe twenty seconds – and then ran off to a car that waited with (as I recall) a getaway driver down the street.  We spent the next segment having people read their own personalized Phantom Caller (and, I guess, Handbiller) bits live on the air. 

It was not long after this that I actually met “The Phantom Caller”.  Back during the days of the “Fairness Doctrine”, talk radio was a financial gulag.  The listeners were older and not all that well-off; the audiences at KSTP were a fraction of what they’d be a few short years later after Limbaugh resuscitated the format.  As a result, I – like a lot of entry-level talk station employees – freelanced like a madman to make ends meet.  One of my many side gigs involved doing freelance writing for a slew of Saint Paul neighborhood papers (which, at that time, was a steadier source of income than trying to freelance for the dailies – if not quite as “glamorous”).  Two of them were “The Highland Villager” and “The Grand Avenue Gazette” – both edited by one Mike Mischke.

One day I drove down to their offices in Highland to turn in a story before I drove out to the station.  Mike looked my copy over as we traded some small talk about the Vogel show – and then looked up. 

“By the way, I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell you this, but my brother Tommy is the Phantom Caller”. 

It all clicked. 

I did, as a matter of fact, sit on that factoid until the last show of Don’s first hitch at KSTP, back in January of 1987. 

I listened to Mischke for much of his career at KSTP, although I regrettably couldn’t listen much after he moved to days, a few years ago. 

Tom’s more than a host, of course; he’s also a neighbor.  He coached my (our, actually) kids’ softball team a few years back; I run into him periodically at the neighborhood coffee shop or the grocery store.  He actually remembers me, which is kind of a kick, and not really surprising.

———-

Mischke’s show was a genuine original; all the right people liked him (Garrison Keillor had him on Prairie Home Companion as a musical guest a few years back – Tom is, of course, a very talented pianist and harmonical player).  But like a lot of genuine originals in any art form (and Mischke’s radio was a sort of art form – and I say this while stressing that radio as a whole is a craft), the art depended on having a patron to shield the artist from the spikes and deadfalls of the open market.

That someone, so rumor always had it, was Ginny Morris, one of the granddaughters of Stanley Hubbard the Elder, the founder of Hubbard Broadcasting (and one of the great pioneers of American broadcasting in his own right) and the person who really pulls the strings on the radio side at Hubbard.  Ms. Morris – so the rumors in the industry had it, at least when I was paying attention to them – kept Mischke on the payroll, and on the air, for many long years when there was no explicit market demand for a free-form, eccentric stream-of-consciousness show like his.  As talk radio morphed into what it is today – a venue for partisan anger, humor and information – Mischke was an outlier who, I think it’s fair to say, could only exist in the market with the aid of someone who really really wanted him to exist.

And like anyone with a cult following, his cult can’t imagine life without him.  David Brauer – himself a former KSTP-AM morning guy and someone for whom the radio market could not find a place – does what many of Mischke’s biggest (or at least most-prominent) fans do; sneer down their rhetorically-patrician noses at the hoi-polloi that just didn’t get it:

Expect a torrent of outrage; for 17 years, Mischke has been a genuine, funny, decent presence in a commercial-radio landscape filled with haters and bloviators.

If a conservative talk show host orders a pizza in the woods and David Brauer or Garrison Keillor or Nick Coleman isn’t there to hear it, is he still hateful?

Seriously – do Mischke’s more exceptionalistic fans seriously believe that Tom was a higher life form that suffered the fools with whom he was forced (by some unthinking, lumpen fate) to associate out of the goodness of his own sainted heart?

No.  Rush Limbaugh and Jason Lewis and Sean Hannity and Dr. Laura Schlesinger and all of the other “haters and bloviators” during the station’s golden age that, as it happens, coincided with Mischke’s career as a headliner, gave KSTP-AM the opportunity to give Mischke his opportunity.  “Hate and bloviation” (AKA “opinion that dissents from Garrison Keillor and David Brauer and Steve Perry and the rest of the Twin Cities’ closely-held media elite) allowed KSTP to run a show like Mischke’s – a show that earned the station a lot of high-end mindshare but never (so the rumor mill has it) got the numbers that would have allowed it to survive purely on the merits of its own market share.

Limbaugh and Jason Lewis carried Mischke – not the other way around.

In the past few years, KSTP-AM embarked (this is my opinion, but I’ll stand by it) on a suicide dive, following the opinions of some pretty dubious consultants who never much liked the conservative talk phenomenon; the shows that pulled KSTP-AM out of palookaville fifteen and twenty years ago, Limbaugh and Jason Lewis (along with Joe Soucheray, who still delivers the numbers although he’s been doing essentially the same show every day since Bob Dole was a candidate, not a pitchman) got away without much overt gnashing and wailing on KSTP’s part.  That, combined with the drastic drop in ad revenue tied to the economic slowdown, is making life pretty dismal (according to the rumor mill as well as the news of layoffs at Channel Five) over at Hubbard.

So what’s next for Tom?  Tom’s always audibly chafed at life in corporate America, even the indulgent, “Lord of the Flies” version of it that Hubbard seemed to have provided him for the past sixteen years; he’s always been able to not only string together a living, but do it with style. 

It’s happening all over the business.  All of radio is hitting an epic revenue trough.  There is almost no part of radio that isn’t being gutted by the combined onslaught of the IPod, satellite radio, the proliferation of media.

Except conservative talk, of course. 

For better or worse. 

———-

Me?  I hope his goodwill with Garrison Keillor pays off for him.  I think he’d be an excellent addition to some part of Keillor’s little empire (although Tom might find Keillor a much less understanding or tolerable boss than Ginny Morris); I think having TD alongside Tim Russell and Sue Scott would be genius.

[Conflict of interest note; Konrad hired me at KSTP in the mid-’90s; he was a very supportive boss. Tommy was a very supportive colleague.]

[Conflict of interest note of my own:  I also used to work with Konrad, at KDWB in the early ’90s.  In 1991, KSTP-AM interviewed for a new program director; Steve and I were the final two.  Steve got the job, partly because he’s a very talented guy who deserved a job, and partly because the consultant who was being paid to bend Ginny Morris’ ear was convinced that political talk was dead, and that Limbaugh was a success not because he was conservative, but because he was breezy and irreverent.  In his world, Jason Lewis and Sean Hannity and, for that matter, the Northern Alliance had no future – but Turi Rider was a creative genius.  I disagreed; Steve got the job.  Would KSTP-AM be better-off today had I gotten the gig?  Maybe, maybe not.

But at my third interview, whilst discussing the point with the consultant who, it was clear, was going to make the call, and feeling like I was losing the point, I figured I’d toss out a favor to an old friend.

“If you like funny radio…have you ever heard of a guy named Don Vogel?  I hear he just got fired in Milwaukee”. 

“I think I have is tape somewhere”, said the consultant.  “I haven’t really listened to it”. 

“Give it a listen”, I said. 

It wasn’t long after that that Vogel came back to KSTP-AM (along with not a few of the products from a number of my answers to the question “what would you do if you were the program director”).  And then they hired Mischke, first as the producer and then his sidekick.

(Don on left, Tom on right, and the listener who owns the photo in the middle).

Make what you will of it.  Just saying.

Anyway – best of luck, Tom.

Steve “Mister Furious” Perry is out at the Minnesoros “Independent”, says David Brauer: 

This is the other shoe dropping after MnIndy’s parent, Center for Independent Media, announced last month that the staff was being pared, freelance budget eliminated, and editing centralized in Washington, D.C.

“Independent” media with “centralized” editing!

CIM, a nonprofit, has been under fire locally for badgering its staff to, in the words of ex-freelancer Britt Robson, run “stories that embarrassed Republicans and promoted Democrats.”

That ran counter to Perry’s “pox-on-all-power” ethos honed to a knife’s edge during his many years as City Pages’ editor.

While Learned Foot is right – Perry did a lot more poxing the right than the left over the years, and there was a reason he worked for a left-leaning group and was in charge of an assembly of committed lefties that – I’ll give him that much. 

Under Perry, City Pages overtook the Twin Cities Reader as the top local alt-weekly; [although the Reader’s complete demise in 1991 may have helped that – Ed.] since his February hiring, MnIndy’s traffic has soared, as this chart demonstrates. It was definitely a team effort — reaching a high point during the Republican National Convention — but Perry hired several members of that team.

And the world thanks him for keeping Karl Bremer in the headlines.  (Whooee).

Update II: A Perry ex-colleague asks whether Perry’s Daily Mole will make a comeback. From the looks of the cute 404 message, not imminently.

With ad budgets drying up and (who are we kidding) the political need for lefty propaganda sites diminished (for the next year or so, anyway), I can’t imagine a worse time to try to re-establish something like the Daily Mold, at least if “earning a living” is an issue.

Does Perry have enough friends at the MNPost to make a go of it?  Would he take a gig there if offered?  What else is in the wings for Mister Furious?

Oh, well.  All the best, Perry. 

A gaffe, it is said, is when a politican slips up and tells the truth.

By a similar token, I suppose, “reporting” is what happens when a news organization stops trolling for titillation and/or stops carrying water for their favored politicians, and starts doing their putative job – in this case, “fisking” (although they’d never call it that) a recent letter from Rep. Charlie Rangel that made some iffy claims about his own record:

The New York Times has posted Rep. Charles Rangel’s letter alongside a point-by-point takedown of his arguments. “You really have to read it to believe it,” write Gabriel Sherman and Chris Rovzar. “Now the paper has moved beyond implying that Rangel has done wrong and is currently calling him a liar and a fantasist.”

Will wonders never cease?

How many Twin Cities leftyblogs jumped up and down and chattered like poo-flinging monkeys at the Franken campaign’s claim that, according to their double-dog secret internal count, were up 22 votes in the recount?

Many.  A veritable   phalanx of the dim,  in-the-bag, deluded, chuzzlewitted and overexposed.
How many said “Hey, wait, this is Franken’s lawyer’s internal count, and we might not want to necessarily use this as grounds to throw another epic Broward-County-like tantrum to try to delegitimize any result that doesn’t go our way, undercutting democracy in the process?”
Few. Very few.

According to David Brauer, the Strib’s management is counting down to bankruptcy – or at least that’s what they’re telling their unions:

Publisher Chris Harte, who sent what I’m now calling the “six weeks to bankruptcy” memo Tuesday afternoon, wasn’t at a meeting Royce and other Guild leaders shortly before the communication was released. Instead, the Guild types found representatives of the Blackstone Group — the Strib’s “restructuring consultant” — and “a couple, three lawyers,” Royce says.Management, which seeks $20 million in cuts from the Strib’s unions, met its major locals separately. I asked Royce if he received the newsroom’s expected share; he declined to comment.

The question for readers, of course, is how many journalists will be left after the wreckage clears.

(Sarcasm on)  “No, David: the real question is how many journalists are there now, and if having more actual journalism and less strident agenda-flogging might have helped the paper out (/sarcasm off).

No, I suspect that even a paper that had spent decades building a reputation for rigorously balancing points of view would be having trouble today.  An interesting question might be “would a paper with a reputation for meticulous balance, or an out-and-out conservative paper, be in this kind of trouble today”?

Of course, there are painfully few examples of either.  The Wall Street Journal is mistakenly considered “conservative” (their columnists are, but their news coverage is all over the place), and they seem to be holding their own, more or less, but then their market is a lot more specialized.

Examples?

There’s a genuine economic crisis out there.  I’ve lived through enough of them (barely, in a few cases) to know not to be excessively dismissive or sanguine about ’em; but for the grace of God, most of us are a couple of bad executive decisions or market breaks away from the unemployment line. 

And yet for all the media’s carping about the dismal state of the economy, “Black Friday” sales were up three percent from last year – a complete turnabout on the media’s pre-Thanksgiving drumbeat, which called for big drops in sales on the nation’s biggest shopping day.

John at Powerline has a theory about the media’s reflexive bleakness (emphasis added):

The financial crisis is real, and we are most likely in a recession. But the hysterical terms in which the economy is discussed are unwarranted and unhelpful. They are also, I think, politically motivated. Reporters and editors like the idea of a looming depression (or, failing that, an unusually severe recession) for a number of reasons. If it happens, it will be taken as refutation of the relatively conservative consensus that has influenced government policies since the early 1980s–a consensus under which a great many people have flourished, but not, notably, reporters and editors. And if it doesn’t happen, they will give the credit to Barack Obama and the more-liberal policies they expect from his administration. So for the left, hysteria over the economy is a win-win proposition. Not so for the rest of us.

Not to mention that it sells papers; hysteria gets people tuned in and/or buying those papers.

Or so the theory goes.

Oh, yeah – read the whole thing, naturally.

…and so irrelevant.
…and so going out of business.

In a review of AC/DC, Chris Riemenschneider of the Star Tribune is confused.

Pining for a real job in journalism, he must think weaving politics into a music review will lead to getting “discovered.”

“War Machine.” The best song on the new CD, it starts with a slow, lumbering, tank-attack beat and quickly builds to atom-bomb intensity, with Angus shredding his guitar as if it was the U.S. Constitution during the Iraq War.

Well, he did get a mention in the Wall Street Journal.

…too bad it’s for all the wrong reasons.

I hope you have other “skills” Chris.

Conservative firebrand Bill O’Reilly assails the press’ “in-the-bag” Obama bias in the past election:

“It’s the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war,” O’Reilly said at a panel of media analysts. “It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage.”

O’Reilly, who maintains Time’s political site “The Page,” cited two New York Times articles as examples of the divergent coverage of the two candidates.

“The example that I use, at the end of the campaign, was the two profiles that The New York Times ran of the potential first ladies,” O’Reilly said. “The story about Cindy McCain was vicious. It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it case her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn’t talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that’s ever been written about her.”

Of course, coming from Bill O’Reilly, that’s no surprise.

CORRECTION: Oops. I slipped while doing a “replace all”, and inadvertently substituted “O’Reilly” for “Mark Halperin”, the admittedly left-leaning “Time” magazine editor who actually said all of that.

I regret the error.

When a young person takes his or her life it is of course a sad story. A life snuffed before it has begun.

When it happens with an audience, on the internet, it becomes national news.

…and a threat to the first amendment.

MIAMI (AP) — The father of a college student whose suicide was broadcast live over a webcam said Saturday he was appalled by the virtual audience that egged on his son and called for tougher regulation of Internet sites.

I can’t imagine the devastation and loss this father feels. Maybe it is the depth of that sorrow, looking for some meaning or utility for his son’s death that leaves him thinking that a law restricting the internet, or holding providers culpable could have prevented his son’s suicide.

Police found Abraham Biggs Jr. dead in his father’s bed Wednesday, 12 hours after he first declared on the website for bodybuilders that he planned to take his own life. He took a fatal drug overdose in front of an Internet audience. Although some viewers contacted the website to notify police, authorities did not reach his house in time.

“I think after this incident and probably other incidents that have occurred in the past, they all point to some kind of regulation is necessary,” Biggs said. “I think it is wrong to have this happen for hours without any action being taken from the people in charge. Where were they all the time?”

Bigg’s son suffered from bipolar disease and had previously threatened to commit suicide at least once before he took his own life.

Let’s hope lawmakers don’t leverage this type of event coupled with recent talk of resurrecting the “Fairness Doctrine” to restrict unfettered self expression and the free flow information on the internet.

That would also be a tragedy.

NPR’s “Morning Edition” carried a story yesterday morning that made me go “Hmmmm”.

The thesis – bad dconomies don’t cause crime waves:

There are few outlaws in the United States as famous as Bonnie and Clyde — a young couple, with no jobs or prospects, driving across the country robbing banks and killing police officers to make ends meet during the Great Depression.

It’s an indelible image of what people will do during desperate times. For a while, Bonnie and Clyde were almost American heroes.

There’s only one problem: The Depression years had very little crime.

The story went from there to claim that…:

Just look at the 1920s, says David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention at John Jay College of Criminal Studies.

“It was a period of booming economic prosperity, the roaring ’20s, and very high crime,” he says.

The 1950s and ’60s were the same. The economy was great, but crime rates rose every single year.

Well, I know one thing; my kids aren’t going to John Jay College of Criminal Studies.

The 1920’s were a booming stretch of time; they were also the peak of Prohibition, which helped organized crime metastasize out of the inner metropoli out across the entire country. 

And by the way, crime rates in general may have been low-ish, but the murder rate peaked at 9.7 per 100,000 in 1933. 

And what happened during the ’50’s and ’60’s?  “Urban Renewal” and the building of the Interstate system gutted the stable beating hearts out of many American cities (including both of the Twin Cities), disrupting low-income communities (like Saint Paul’s Rondo and Minneapolis’ Phillips neighborhoods, turning them from dowdy and low-rent but close-knit and low-crime areas into dangerous ghettoes overnight) and trashing the landscape.  The sixties also brought us the Great Society, which in trying to “declare war” on poverty succeeded in institutionalizing it, and the beginning of the “war on drugs”, which created an upward-incentive on the price of drugs and a profitable niche for criminals to both fill and violently defend (not to mention the fact that the Baby Boom got into their most criminally-susceptible years starting around 1964).  As a result, the murder rates zoomed during the seventies, peaking at a record 10 per 100,000 in 1980. 

When the economy goes bad, many people move in with parents or relatives, and they stay home more — both of which appear to have a calming effect, experts say.

The “experts” seem to be focusing on property crime, rather than violent crimes, especially murder.  I’d suspect (with no academic proof whatsoever) that property crime is a “smile problem”; if people have stuff to steal, people will steal it (especially given that liberal government policy has created both a permanent underclass and a permanently-inflated drug market).  If people have no stuff to steal…

…well, you probably don’t go to John Jay College of Criminal Justice or work for Morning Edition, so you know where this is going, right?

The question isn’t so much why they arrived at their conclusion, or why NPR ran the story. 

The real question is “how does NPR story think this is going to benefit an Obama Administration”.

Gary Gross’ “Let Freedom Ring” blog – which has become an essential read for Sixth District politics and Minnesota GOP inside baseball – turns four today.

And Gary’s still on a mission:

Tony Snow asked some former CNN executive what he thought about these bloggers scooping the MSM. Out of that came the infamous line that bloggers were just a bunch of jammie-wearing “people hacking away at their keyboards.” Typical of the Sneering Media, this executive couldn’t get even the basic facts right.

Four years later, the Sneering Media still isn’t getting the basic facts right. In fact, I attended more voter forums than the St. Cloud Times did. Even when they were there for the forums, they omitted key bits of information.

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve done more reporting this year, actually breaking stories. Expect that to increase as 2009 unfolds. Just like with politics, now isn’t the time to spend alot of time looking back. Now’s the time to look forward. Now’s the time when bloggers peered into the future of the blogosphere. It’s time we mixed in as much reporting as pontificating.

Look for LFR be in the thick of things on this front.

Happy anniversary, Gary.  And keep giving ’em hell.

Politicians and media – and by “media”, I mean the “traditional” media, the “objective/detached” media that most of us grew up assuming “the media” were – have a symbiotic relationship, at best.  Politicans need exposure; the media needs material.  The media’s mission is to get Democrats elected putative mission is to be a private check and balance on government – all government.

 But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that “the media” have changed drastically, and rarely moreso than in the past decade.  From the rise of conservative talk radio and the Drudge Report through the explosion of alternative media that they both helped spawn (including this blog and the related talk show), the media’s world has changed as completely as that of any buggy-whip manufacturer circa 1900. 

Of course, any symbiotic relationship has its limits.  A shark will tolerate the remora fish that picks bits of crud out of its gills; it’d probably draw the line at a barracuda try to fill the gig.

With that in mind, I read with interest this piece in the Minnesoros “Independent”; Chris Steller is peeved about being 86ed from one of Senator Coleman’s press conferences:

U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman’s campaign staff ejected a Minnesota Independent reporter (that would be me) from a press conference at campaign headquarters this afternoon. I made it as far as the inside of a small press conference room at a drab office park in St. Paul where I was just about to settle into the chair that seemed least conveniently located to the exit when a staffer asked who I was with. When I said the Minnesota Independent, he said I’d have to leave. On the one hand, openness to “journalism” on the part of our politicians is a good thing.

On the other hand, when you lie down with the devil, one should not feign the vapors when people wonder “what’s that sulphur smell?”

Steller?  He feighs the vapors:

To my protest that MnIndy is a news outlet like others represented there, the staffer replied, “Right, and it’s funded by George Soros,” and he escorted me out. It’s the fourth time local independent media have been denied access to the senator’s media availability.

Except that the Minnesoros “Independent” is in no way “independent media”.  Leave aside the (accurate, but for our purposes irrelevant) Soros connection; when departing staffers emerge from the Kool-Aid hangover long enough to point out that the “news outlet” that employed them really was a shrill partisan shill – a paid employee of the opposition, in fact – is Coleman and his staff obliged to treat them with the sort of deference and respect that they traditionally pay the Strib, WCCO or MPR?

Bonus question for the Mindy staff (or those that remain):  how do you think I, a talk show host working for a media organization that is as partisan as yours, but at least honest about it, would get treated at a Keith Ellison press conference? 

(Hey, at least right-wing politicians return your calls.  As I showed last year, DFLers apparently consider themselves above that basic courtesy).

Lefties; why should Norm Coleman give access to a media outlet who is not only in the bag for the opposition, but utterly disingenuous about it?

Intern at KSTP-TV wasn’t happy about being tossed:

University of Minnesota student Jennifer Nicole Anato-Mensah, 21, threw a fit last month after Twin Cities station KSTP let her go. She began hurling threats at an executive producer, according to a criminal complaint, and kicked out the glass of a conference room door in an attempt to get at her. “You don’t know where I’m from. I’ll mess you up, b—-,” the student allegedly told the female producer.

The broadcasting industry, being full of deeply dysfunctional people, is full of stories of the tirades and rampages people go on when they get pink-slipped.  But not so much in the news end of things.

And while Hubbard Broadcasting (KSTP-TV’s owners) has cleaned up its image a bit since I worked there (also bored us to death by hiring Willie and Jay to do mornings at KSTP-AM), I think Ms. Anato-Mensah might have had a big future in middle-management there, back in the ’80s.  It’s all in the timing, I guess.

May I suggest sending an audition tape to Springer?

…that the staff of The Onion won’t be missing their target of the past eight years, George W. Bush, nosirreebob…:

Oh, God, no,” says feature editor Joe Garden. “It’s been a nightmare trying to figure out what to do with him [in the paper].” From the Onion’s standpoint, Barack Obama’s nomination and his rock-star celebrity were good news, “simply because he has people interested in politics, which lets us satirize something people care about,” says Garden.

…I have been meaning to ask for quite a while – isn’t it time to start satirizing The Onion? 

Is it just me, or have they been phoning it in for the past year or two?

There might still be a future for newspapers, says Rupert Murdoch – provided they can quit condescending their readers.

I put the over/under at “10% chance”:

With newspapers cutting back and predictions of even worse times ahead, Rupert Murdoch said the profession may still have a bright future if it can shake free of reporters and editors who he said have forfeited the trust and loyalty of their readers.

“My summary of the way some of the established media has responded to the internet is this: it’s not newspapers that might become obsolete. It’s some of the editors, reporters, and proprietors who are forgetting a newspaper’s most precious asset: the bond with its readers,” said Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive officer of News Corp. He made his remarks as part of a lecture series sponsored by the Australian Broadcast Corporation.

The problem?

Murdoch, whose company’s holdings also include MySpace and the Wall Street Journal, criticized what he described as a culture of “complacency and condescension” in some newsrooms.

Complacency hits all different kinds of businesses.  But “journalism” is almost unique in that it engenders a kind of preening condescenscion toward “outsiders”, AKA “the consumer”, the kind of thing you see in bad doctors and worse police departments and all sorts of businesses that have death wishes.

To make his point, Murdoch criticized the media reaction after bloggers debunked a “60 Minutes” report by former CBS anchor, Dan Rather, that President Bush had evaded service during his days in the National Guard.

“Far from celebrating this citizen journalism, the establishment media reacted defensively. During an appearance on Fox News, a CBS executive attacked the bloggers in a statement that will go down in the annals of arrogance. ’60 Minutes,’ he said, was a professional organization with ‘multiple layers of checks and balances.’ By contrast, he dismissed the blogger as ‘a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing.’ But eventually it was the guys sitting in their pajamas who forced Mr. Rather and his producer to resign.

“Mr. Rather and his defenders are not alone,” he continued. “A recent American study reported that many editors and reporters simply do not trust their readers to make good decisions. Let’s be clear about what this means. This is a polite way of saying that these editors and reporters think their readers are too stupid to think for themselves.”

The Strib is worse than most; not only are we peasants too stupid to think for ourselves, they send Lori Sturdevant and Nick Coleman to do our thinking for us.

That’s a slap.

I’ve all but given up on fisking Nick Coleman.  It’s like slapping a brain-damaged dog with a newspaper when he pees on your floor; it’s not like it’s going to actually affect anything.

Indeed, I’ve pondered the notion of completely ignoring the doddering old duffer – a fate he truly deserves above all else. 

But on his record Nick Coleman truly does have one vast, ghastly, unatoned crime against morality, against “right”, even against what used to be called “journalistic ethics” in a time before the term became a weasel-word for “framework allowing journalists to justify pretty much anything they do”.

His shameful, ghastly, ghoulish performance in the wake of the 35W bridge collapse.

A quick timeline for those of you in whom time has sanded off the fury:

1. In the immediate wake of the disaster, Coleman blamed the Pawlenty Administration in a column (which, under the Strib’s singularly gutless policy, is unavailable online).
2. He went on (where else?) MSNBC the Saturday morning after the collapse and, standing on the banks of the Mississippi, and loudly blamed the Pawlenty Administration and the failure of the Gas Tax hike for the collapse.  He also wrote a line in response to claims that he and his ilk were politicizing the tragedy, a line that should be rubbed in the face of the entire Strib editorial board; “Is it political to be angry about that? So be it. Everything is politics. Politics is not a dirty word by itself. Politics builds bridges and schools and hospitals. And politics can make them fall down.” He ignored, natch, the simple fact that every administration had passed on comprehensive bridge maintenance, preferring instead to build more infrastructure.
3. I predicted that Coleman, along with Alice Hausman and Elwyn “E-Tink” Tinklenberg, were going to owe the Administration an apology when the results finally did come out (but they probably wouldn’t do it anyway). 

The scientists have spoken (over Jim Oberstar’s objections, natch); the collapse was the result of faulty – and opaque – calculations made when the bridge was designed, in 1967-68, as well as tons of construction equipment parked atop the bridge (doing, y’know, “maintenance”, the stuff that the Administration was criticized for not doing).

Coleman’s response?  ignore all those “experts”; my agenda trumps your facts!:

The National Transportation Safety Board is able to explain structural failures. It is not much good at explaining governmental ones.

Especially when they are scientifically irrelevant.

The final report on the Interstate 35W bridge blames the collapse on an obscure bridge designer who, like 13 citizens trying to get home on Aug. 1, 2007, is dead.

The report, curiously, is silent on Nick Coleman’s non-sequitur juxtaposition of unrelated factoids to try to drum up a spurious, uninformed (indeed, disinformed) emotional reaction. 

Conspiracy? 

Let’s see, as he attempts to pull off the difficult Triple Non-Sequitur:

In effect, the NTSB adopted a conclusion reached days after the collapse by an outside consulting firm hired by Gov. Tim Pawlenty for $2 million — the exact same cost as a plan to reinforce the bridge that had been rejected by the same administration: “The dead guys did it.”

Pawlenty got the right answer for the exact cost of a “plan” that would likely not have prevented the bridge collapse in the first place, in other words.

A very convenient theory. But there’s one problem: Carol Molnau is still alive.

On the morning after the bridge collapse, I wrote here that “both political parties have tried to govern on the cheap” and both have scrimped “on the basics.” Still true. But the buck stops with the man in the governor’s chair, and during six years in office, Tim Pawlenty has stopped billions of bucks designated for crucial highway and bridge projects.

None of which would have prevented the collapse!

He has vetoed three transportation bills, including one that passed over his veto while he was engaged in a yearlong beauty pageant, trying out for Miss GOP V-P, a role that went to Caribou Killin’ Sarah Palin.

All of which happened after the collapse!

His complaints about being the target of premature and unfair criticism after the bridge fell should be viewed as the posturing of a guy who wants to be a standard bearer for the Republicans and needs to shake the mud off his feet.

No, Nick Coleman.  His complaints were dead-on.  You defamed him by trying to tie a general policy to a specific consequence…

…which the NTSB has just shown is completely untrue.

Is it unfair to link the bridge to the infrastructure problems that have grown much larger during Pawlenty’s tenure? Hardly.

The the same sense that it is perfectly fair to link the fact that Nick Coleman has a job to the decline of journalism?  Sure.  It’s perfectly logical; “if you fail to systematically unearth bad engineering” is to “bridges fall” as “journalism continues to erode into an agenda-driven exercise in partisanship” is to “Coleman has a gig”. 

Beyond that…?

Despite his post-Obama-slide conversion to a belief that Republicans need to reach out to moderates, T-Paw has embodied the knife-point anti-government agenda of those who think the best way to shrink government is to prove that it doesn’t work. On Aug. 1, 2007, he may have felt the effort had gone a bridge too far.

Or he “may have” been leading a team of Israeli Commandos against a North Korean nuclear reactor in Zimbabwe, at about the time I “may have” been squiring Marisa Tomei about Manhattan and Nick Coleman “may have” been having unprotected conjugal relations with Larry Craig.

“May have”; two words that give weasels the power to move mountains.

“Premature?” How about unveiling plans for a new bridge while victims were in the river?

I’m dying to find out how, in Nick Coleman’s special little world, that’d be any worse than claiming – wrongly – to have solved the mystery based purely on political prejudice.

Is it?

I’m thinking “no”.  

How about hiring a firm supposed to investigate independently that ended up partnering with the NTSB and fingering the gussets (before the wreckage was examined)? Premature? A week after the collapse, Pawlenty declared it “unrelated” to any shortcomings in inspection or maintenance.

Fast work, T-Paw.

A point that is, I’m sure, unrelated:  He was right.   Nick Coleman was irredeemably wrong.

The phrase “Inconvenient Truth” has been stripped of meaning in the past few years.  A pity.

My point is: Choices were made in funding, inspecting, maintaining and repairing a bridge that yes, had a design flaw, but stood 40 years and never should have collapsed.

Never. Ever. Collapsed.

Since Nick – longtime enemy of “ba-LAW-gers”, has adopted one of the most irritating blogging techniques (the. serial. periods. to. connote. emphasis.), perhaps it’s time to declare victory and leave the old dolt alone. 

The bridge did collapse.  There is very little reason to believe any amount of spending would have involved retroactively analyzing the gusset plate design, or that any of the supposed upgrades would have prevented the collapse at all. 

Yes, Tim Pawlenty has a bad case of Potomac Fever, but he is Minnesota’s governor and he needs to stop complaining about unfair criticism and take Big Boy responsibility for a catastrophic failure that happened on his watch. He has not said what any governor must say:

“Minnesota, your government let you down. I am sorry. We did not do our job. There are no excuses.”

Sure.  Perhaps Pawlenty should  join with Jesse Ventura, E-Tink, Arne Carlson, Rudy Perpich, Al Quie, Wendell Anderson and, by the way, the ghost of Nick Coleman  Senior, who was Speaker of the Minnesota House when the bridge was designed and built; perhaps that phalanx should admit the blazingly obvious, that mistakes happen and that government has never been able to repeal that fact, and move on to try to do things better.

It’s probably more likely than the Star/Tribune making the same admission as Nick Coleman is chased from the building.

———-

The Strib will never chase Nick Coleman from the building.  But I will chase him from this blog.  He is a doddering old fool, in the classical sense of the term “fool”, and is of no value to this community, to journalism…

…or, really, to this blog, anymore.  Fisking the old duffer has become a rote exercise.  It’s like playing basketball against people on crutches.

And so while there’s no way I will guarantee this promise, and there’s no way for anyone to enforce it, I retire from fisking Nick Coleman.  A year after a bridge collapse that was the nadir of a career of mediocre petulance, Nick Coleman lived down to even the minuscule expectations I had of him.

There is really nothing more to say about him; so I hereby wall off that cavern-full of thud-witted venality from my consciousness forevermore.

(more…)

Ace on the politically-motivated, officially-sanctioned, illegal smearing of Joe Wurzelbacher:

Wow! That “Sudden Fame Exception” to privacy wasn’t known by many, but it sure seems to have been known by partisan Democratic Ohio bureaucrats!

…The Beacon Journal has learned that, in addition to the Department of Job and Family Services, two other state offices — the Ohio Department of Taxation and Ohio Attorney General Nancy Rogers — conducted database searches of Joe the Plumber.

…Anthony said the database searches on both days were conducted to ensure that the information in Lucas County was being properly reported by the media.

”Wouldn’t that have been a disaster if the lien had been paid,” Kohlstrand said. ”The responsible thing for us to do would be to take prompt steps to make it right.”

 

God Bless You for your service.

Yep.  Glad our Democrat-party-linked state government officials aren’t a bunch of pettifogging ward-heelers abusing their power for political gain or anything.  That’ll teach all you uppity peasants.

Where is the ACLU, anyway?

The first post this blog did that generated any attention – and by that, I mean maybe 50-60 hits, in those days before this blog had any kind of regional following at all, back in the summer of 2002 or so – was the “DFL Dictionary”.  The post – which is, unfortunately, lost to history (for now) listed a series of common words that the DFL had re-defined for their purposes.  For example:

“Bipartisanship (noun): to belong to a non-DFL party, but to espouse and support DFL policies without any serious question”.

That kind of thing.

And it’s become almost a cliche among leftybloggers in recent months lately as long as I’ve been reading them;  a sort of inexorable “inflation” in pejoratives.  Conservatives never take umbrage, they “whine”; we don’t argue, we “melt down. 

Now, I’m a pretty lucky guy.  Generally pretty happy with life.  I have two great kids, a job I love, a couple of hobbies I love even more, great family, great friends – really, just about a guy could want out of life.  I’m in the best shape I’ve been in in decades, I’m feeling generally good about life, I’ve dispensed with a lot of real and metaphorical baggage in the past year or so, and while life has all sorts of inevitable twists and turns, things are generally going pretty dang well right now.  One of my hobbies – debating politics with strangers in writing and on the radio – has turned into a fun sideline; in this, I’ve been able to find some semblance of fulfillment, as well as some future possibilities, while honoring my sense of integrity.  In other words, I’m getting little bits and piece of happiness, and all in all it’s a pretty good stretch for me, knock wood.

Which, if you’re a gutless anonymous leftyblogger, means “angry”, “hateful”, bla bla bla.

No, really.  “Stove” from Cocky Slob just can’t get enough of trying to jam people into his own bigoted little template:

It came to Spot today, unbidden. In over three years of reading blogs and writing this one, Spot has been unable to find the word that summed up the festering Bund of the right wing blogosphere. But he’s got it now: bullies.

Ooh.  Another neo-Nazi reference. 

He must be writing about something serious.

What, after all, is a bully? It’s someone who is cruel and overbearing, a thug. Someone who picks on somebody else, preferably smaller and weaker, maybe to make himself feel like a big cheese, or even just appear to be one to the drooling sycophants he wants to impress. The words of the bully almost always have a tinge of intimidation in them, or sometimes more than just a tinge.

Or sometimes much, much less than a “tinge”. 

Indeed, in some cases it’s more of a “little corner of actual meaning that you’ve carefully sanded to fit your own  myopic, bigoted, deranged template through which you force all of your own perceptions”. 

As in “you read “apples”, and see “axles””.

There they sit on the bar stool of grudge and resentment, taking big swigs from their tankards of bile, belting out tuneless refrains of impotent rage. Then, tottering home in crazed and bilious humors, they sit down and write stuff like this.

He links to the piece I wrote Tuesday about former Minnesoros “Independent” writer Molly Priesmeyer and City Pages doddering troll Emily Kaiser. 

Rage?  Bile?  Crazed? 

It is no especial mystery why all the paranoid, poisoned, gun-toting crazies are all on one side.

(Although why some people need to vilify, defame and demonize those who disagree with them is an “especial” puzzler to those of us with fuller, richer lives) 

 The pathology is unremarkable. But its consequences over the last twenty five years or so have been catastrophic.

If only because they – “consequences” like people speaking freely and still disagreeing with “Spot”, gutless anonyme – seem to have driven their author around the bend into complete derangement.

Intimidation?  I wished Molly Priesmeyer good luck in her job searc, having been in her shoes all too many times (sometimes with kids to feed, to boot).  I’d like to be so “intimidated” by my nemeses.

Bullying?   I’m the underdog, you half-trained trick chimp.  I’m a little solo blogger from Saint Paul.  Emily Kaiser writes for a multi-million dollar corporation; Molly Priesmeyer wrote for a Soros front, and not being an untalented writer will no doubt get picked up by another sooner than later.

It is a period from which the barest signs of emerging have now just appeared. But the bud is nascent and the bullies will try to kill it.

Catch that?  It’s not just responding – “participating in life”.  It’s “bullying” and “crushing your hopes”. 

For some of us, the notion of “disagreement” and “dissent” isn’t a threat. For the others, there are anonymously-posted pictures of the Nuremberg Rallies.

Courage my friends.

“Courage”.  Heh.

This from a guy who blogs anonymously – who quite visibly panics, indeed, at the notion of being “outed”, when he’s not taking his defamatory, cowardly little shots at his betters.

The word we’re looking for is “deranged”.  

Look that one up on “Answers.com”. 

Courage, little doggie.  Now, run and play.  You are boring and predictable.

(Via Fut)

In the wake of the budget trimming at the Minnesoros “Independent”, someone leaked a copy of Robin “Rew” Marty’s memo to the surviving staff to Romanesko.  Who printed it (I add emphasis):

Memo to Center for Independent Media employess

Hi, everyone. I know the last 24 hours have been a lot to think about. We also understand that one of the the assets of online media is that everyone knows lots of reporters, and has established very close relationships with their media, both local and national. I need to ask you all to please not respond to media questions about the CIM and our restructuring process. If you receive any calls or emails, please forward that information on to me so I can direct inquiries to the proper channel. It is imperative that you do not talk to the media yourself about this issue. Any violation of this will be grounds for immediate dismissal.

Thank you for your assistance in this, and one again, thank you all for continuing on with us. If you have any questions, please do hesitate to contact me.

Robin Marty
Deputy Program Director
Center for Independent Media

On the one hand, it’s “good” to see that an organization that would seem to have no capacity for shame actually being embarassed.

Or at least to know they should be.

David Brauer on the melt-down:

In essence, the memo tells the chain’s remaining muckraking journalists not to talk to muckraking journalists calling about recent budget slashing.

…

For the record, I’ve emailed Marty — no response. CIM spokesperson Dan Walter, emailed me Monday that “a letter from the publisher on the site tomorrow explaining the situation” would be posted — it wasn’t. And requests to interview CIM poohbah David Bennahum have been met with Walter’s cordial stonewalling (though a Colorado site gets hilariously contradictory interviews with CIM’s leadership here.)

If Bennahum thought this was going to blow over, Romenesko just blew him up.

 Welcome to the feeding frenzy, by the way, Romanesko and Brauer.  Glad to see what it takes for alt-leftymedia to make it on the alt-leftymedia radar:

Agenda journalists obfuscate and stonewall about their funding?  Not a story.

Buddies of lefty alt-media figures feel they’ve been shafted by fellow lefty alt-media figures?  That’s a story.

But better late than never, anyway.

Now that the Minnesoros “Independent” has accomplished its mission of serving as a local-regional propaganda outlet for the mid-to-far left – a sort of local analogue to “Media Matters” and “MoveOn”, even as far as sharing some of the same funding sources – and the election is over…

…the reason for having the “Independent” has apparently passed.  The Center for “Independent” Media has yanked the budget leash on its’ “independent” vassals affiliates.

The first sign?  The “Independent” has started whacking its staff:

A couple more names are victims of budget-cutting at Minnesota Independent: full-timer Andy Birkey and politics freelancer Britt Robson.

Birkey had covered LGBT issues for the site since its August 2006 inception; he was one of two staffers axed, along with reporter Molly Priesmeyer.

The last time I knew anything of the “Independent”‘s financials, the “writers” got a stipend for working part-time for the glorified blog.  I’d suspect – and will try to dig up info – that when they brought on former journalist and ex-City Pages editor Steve Perry, it came along with a big, and currently unnecessary, jump in funding.

But I’ve come to look forward to staff departures at the “Independent”, because it seems that’s when the actual truth comes out.  When Eric Black left, he let slip the Mindy’s Soros connection (the worst-kept secret in the Twin Cities alt-media). 

And now, Britt Robson – one of the Mindy’s few capable better writers, unencumbered by having to carry the water for his overlords in DC, lets fly (emphasis added):

Robson became a casualty when MnIndy’s parent, the D.C.-based Center for Independent Media (CIM), eliminated the freelance budget entirely…However, Robson — who writes about arts for MinnPost and sports for The Rake — was caustic in his view [of] MnIndy’s Capitol overlords. He says CIM’s national staff was less interested in the organization’s professed mission — “a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that operates an independent online news network in the public interest” — than boosting the party of Barack Obama.

“I was working with them fairly closely during the Republican convention and privy to interoffice emails,” Robson explains. “The type of things non-local editors were into were very party-race stories, particularly stories that embarrassed Republicans and promoted Democrats.”

Wow.

Kinda exactly like the Mindy’s critics have been saying all along, you mean?

Robson believes the local staff chafed at this purposefulness; they consider themselves progressives, not DFL party hacks. He points to Perry’s tenure as City Pages editor, when staffers went after Republicans hard but regularly gnawed the legs off local Democrats such as R.T. Rybak.

A reflexively pro-Dem agenda “is a bias that’s reflected more in the national echelons,” Robson says. “We both know Steve Perry; he probably has as little use for Democrats as Republicans, that’s his reputation.”

That was Perry’s reputation.

My opinion:  when the Mindy got started in 2006 under original “editor” Robin Marty, it was amateurish but earnest.  It had journalistic ambitions, of sorts. 

When Perry took over, whether in spite of his presence or because of it, the paper’s tone became more shrill, more propagandistic; it read less like an earnest college newspaper staffed by newbies, and more like a dumb, trite, phoned-in, ill-informed, propagandistic leftyblog.

David Brauer covers the utterly unsurprising “story” at the slightly-less-overtly-bought-off MNPost; let’s see if my comment ever gets out of moderation.