Community columnist - Rick Starr

The Beatles: Rain, a review

2009-06-18T17:52:31Z

It was 1968, and my journalism teacher often veered off the textbooks and into arguments about contemporary culture: Vietnam, drugs and anything else which struck his fancy. This particular day it was The Beatles, and the debate was about whether their music was actually art or "just", you know, rock and roll. One of the points he railed about was the last 30 seconds of "Strawberry Fields Forever" and of "Rain."

"How do you call that art?", he asked, pointing to George Martin's simple twisting around of the tape and playing part of the last stanza backwards?

We all thought him hopelessly out of it, of course, because the Beatles were God, leading a generation - and the music industry - into areas no one else imagined. And they did it over and over with each succeeding album: from the sugar pop days of "Meet the Beatles" and and "Hard Day's Night" to "Help!", then from "Rubber Soul" to "Revolver", eventually to "Sgt. Pepper" and finally to "Abbey Road", with a few in between stops with the "White Album", "Magical Mystery Tour", and others.

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It wasn't until halfway through the program that the group got to "Strawberry Fields Forever", and I was surprised they chose to include the backwards codicil of the final half-minute of the song in their concert length homage to the group. As an announcement before the show explained, "Every note you will hear tonight is played live, on-stage. No recordings of any kind are used." Somehow they managed to play the last part of "Strawberry Fields Forever" forwards and make it sound backwards, without the magic of recording tape or other technical wizardry. Good show! A small detail, perhaps, but telling.

Rain's program moved through five separate Beatle epochs, with appropriate costume changes and video montages for each, but the best part was the fealty to the originals, in sound, word, and deed. In some history somewhere I read that they have been doing this for 20 years, but there was not a hint of boredom or "I've done this so many times before..." to mar the performance; in fact at several moments during the show the music was so fresh as to bring the crowd to its feet, with the occasional standing ovation. (The guitar solo on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" was one particular standout.)

Solo moments and group, acoustic and electric, mop top and psychedelic, it all happened in a 2 hour (plus) time frame. My biggest fault with the show is that I wanted more. More more more, but doing "the more" that I wanted would put the show at about 9 hours, which might be asking a bit much. I see from some other reviews on-line that they performed songs which we did not hear, and I suppose we heard some songs which others have not, which might explain how the band keeps itself fresh.

There is one small pony in the deal: there are actually five performers on-stage. The Fab Four, of course, and one player on keyboards at the rear, stage right. As the players came out for their curtain call, the 5th Beatle, the quasi-unknown on mellotron, synthesizer, keyboard and who-knows-what-else was introduced and I whispered to my wife: "And playing the part of the 16-track studio, orchestra, horn section, producers, and everything else..." and a masterful job it was. Even the 40-piece orchestral crescendo centerpiece of "A Day In The Life" comes out perfectly, including the final crashing G-chord, perhaps the most famous single sound in contemporary music history, executed perfectly and precisely, thank you.

And that's as it should be, transporting the audience back to another time and place, not necessarily a better time and place mind you, but a different one, and one which, for a couple hours at least, those of us who were privileged to be there then, could pretend to be there again.

A great show, but then the Beatles predicted it so long ago: "They're guaranteed to raise a smile. So may I introduce to you, the act you've known for all these years":

Rain.... David Leon (John); Joey Curatolo (Paul); Tom Teeley (George); Joe Bologna (Ringo); Mark Lewis (manager, producer, orchestra, mellotron, synthesizer, miscellaneous keyboards, special effects, miscellaneous percussion, etc.)

Debunking the Canadian Health Care Myths

2009-06-08T23:16:07Z

Here's an article in the Denver Post which answers most, if not all of the shibboleths about health care in Canada. It's written by a clinical psychologist, who happens to be, well, read it and see:

As a Canadian living in the United States for the past 17 years, I am frequently asked by Americans and Canadians alike to declare one health care system as the better one.
Often I'll avoid answering, regardless of the questioner's nationality. To choose one or the other system usually translates into a heated discussion of each one's merits, pitfalls, and an intense recitation of commonly cited statistical comparisons of the two systems.
Because if the only way we compared the two systems was with statistics, there is a clear victor. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to dispute the fact that Canada spends less money on health care to get better outcomes.
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It's well written, cogent, and precisely on target. All good reasons why the "free market is perfect" crowd won't listen to a word she says.

Wingnuts and Chrysler Dealers

2009-05-28T21:26:44Z

Ah, conservatives are all a twitter because of the possibility that Chrysler dealerships are being closed down because they donated to the opposition during the past election. One wingnut makes the unsubstantiated charge, and the rest of the lemmings follow. As one blogger said "Posts at RedState, Reliapundit, American Thinker, Gateway Pundit, Joey Smith and Doug Ross" pointed intitially at the remarkable number of closed Chrysler dealerships whose owners happen to have been contributors to Obama opponents, mainly Republicans."

OK, that "blogger" didn't say it, he, like so many others, just repeated it. Repeated it. Repeated it, in an unending chain of unfounded accusation, without the slightest raised eyebrow or moment's reflection of its accuracy.

Here's news:
]]> Chrysler is closing down 800 dealerships. Some of them are bound to be from people who "contributed to the other side." Indeed, without any further knowledge at all one might expect it would be half. Here's some further knowledge: Car dealers tend to be older men, who form the last remaining bastion of the Republican base. A quick analysis of their PAC contributions over the last election cycle shows that they gave to McCain 3-to-1 over Obama. There's a big surprise: they went for the party which is anti-labor, anti-green, pro-tax cut, anti-anything government.

So, a little quick math demonstrates that probably about 550 of the dealerships which are to be closed lean Republican. What a shocker that some of them donated to McCain and not to Obama.

The fact that some of those are to be closed apparently suffices as evidence of some sort of cabal, some secret intrigue, some political payback, some dirty shenanigans going on in the dark corridors of the West Wing. Or, as my hapless blogger opined "This is no surprise: Chicagoland politics have moved to the White House."

One can only imagine that some people were both without a skeptic gene, and don't have the elementary ability to consider an all-too-apparent and logical explanation.

Next up: I reach into a bag of M&M's and come up with some red ones. Clearly this is an indication that Obama is controlling how many of which colors the Mars Corporation is being allowed to put into each bag. I have no further evidence to support the charge, but apparently that doesn't matter.

Another Bogus Statistic

2009-05-25T20:16:56Z

It makes me crazy. People who should know better - don't. Robert J. Samuelson, columnist on economic matters for the Washington Post and Newsweek, writes that he hopes Social Security and Medicare go bankrupt, and the sooner the better.

Well, intemperate though that might be, it's his opinion and he's entitled to it, even if it's so clearly daft. But what's worse is that he buttresses his argument with the same tired statistics of how much longer people life since the Social Security program was enacted:

"In 1940, life expectancy at birth was 61.4 years for men, 65.7 for women; by 2008, the comparable figures were 75.4 and 80." - Washington Post, May 25, 2009

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Now, wait a minute. A bit of research, which one hopes an erudite and award winning writer like Mr. Samuelson would undertake, quickly demonstrates that 2/3 of that expansion in life expectancy has come because we manage to save more youngsters from dying in childhood. Measles. Diptheria. Whooping cough. That sort of thing. The relevant statistics for Social Security aren't "life expectancy at birth", but "life expectancy from age 20", the age at which people generally begin their work and tax paying years.

As callous as it is to say it, from Social Security's point of view it doesn't matter if half of all 5 year olds die next year; it's irrelevant to the program. Those poor souls never pay in, they never take out. This is a clear case of lying with numbers, and Mr. Samuelson has done it adroitly.

It took me all of two minutes with Google to find this chart, which indicates that the life expectancy for white males at age 20 has expanded from 47 (more) years in 1940 to about 56 (more) years in 2004. It appears that Mr. Samuelson has overstated the case by about 50%. (The numbers are similar, if different for women, and for minorities.)

According to Wikipedia, Mr. Samuelson's columns "advocate the conservative viewpoint." Color me surprised that he would paint the worst scenario using misleading statistics. Who could have guessed?

The trouble with health care

2009-05-24T20:19:12Z

I'm one who thinks the current health care system is a bit screwy, but I'll leave the details for a possible future column in your favorite local newspaper. In the meantime, I'm certainly not alone in this; there's a debate (of sorts) going on all across the country, and President Obama keeps saying that he's going to propose some sort of legislation later this year. We'll see.

For now what passes for debate goes something like this missive in the current issue of BusinessWeek, as columnist Catherine Arnst opines:

"keep in mind that there are only three ways to pay for universal coverage: Raise taxes, cut payments to medical providers, or ration care."
]]> Well, her declarative finality aside, she's just simply mistaken, and she's looking in all the wrong places.

It's generally accepted that about 35% of our health care expenditures have nothing to do with actually providing better health. They are the dollars the doctors' offices spend on clerical help chasing down insurance company payments, negotiating with insurers over what will or won't be paid, which networks offer which kind of coverage; they are the dollars the insurance companies spend on rooms full of claims deniers and underwriters figuring out who they will or won't accept; they are the dollars in the CEO salaries, profit margins, and costs of running those huge conglomerates, of keeping shareholders happy, of wining and dining local agents, and more.

35%! That's a serious piece of change in this trillion dollar industry. It's even more galling when you look at the kinds of overhead that single-payer systems like Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA have: generally in the low single digits: 2%, 3%, something like that. And this is not out of line with what the overhead is for foreign single-payer "universal health" systems.

Another commonly accepted statistic is that around 45 million Americans don't have health insurance, and so to some degree have suboptimal health care: either they go broke paying for medical problems, or they ignore them and get worse, or they don't fill prescriptions because of cost, or they don't get tests because they can't afford them, or they show up at the local emergency room and then don't pay the bill.

If my math is correct, 45 million people is about 1/6 of the country. Typically these would tend to be younger than average (since older people are covered by Medicare, and many in the middle age spans by their workplace plans), so presumably the medical costs would be less, in aggregate, than for other groups.

1/6 of the country. And we have 1/3 of the current payments accomplishing nothing but paper pushing, denial and frustration. Anyone with fourth-grade math competence can figure out "how to pay for this" can't they?

Well, Ms. Arnst throws in the dreaded "R" word, as in "rationing." I've heard it before, I'll hear it again. Funny thing is that I participate in a number of online forums, and some of them have significant numbers of Canadians, and even on occasion people from France or other countries where "universal" is the way of life. I have yet to find one of them who would trade their system for ours, indeed, it is rare to find one who can tell of a significant "delay" in getting treatment, the outlier examples so often thrown up in this discussion by the entrenched and happy forces of the industry as it currently stands. It's true that elective procedures occasionally take a backseat to urgent care, but then isn't that what "elective" means?

I confess, I do not know how to jump the chasm - how to get from the system we have to, say, a system like Canada's. It appears that Obama wants to add more and more little programs: an SCHIP here, a special plan for college students there, a voluntary enrollment for some in this aisle, a different bill for low-income people over in that one. Pre-tax health payment schemes for some, special state assistance for certain others.

At the end of the day this is going to be more maddeningly complex than the IRS rules that Congress passes, when it all should be so easy. Bah.

The sad part is that it will never get better until people get over their allergic reaction to a single-payer system, but that seems unlikely as long as columnists like Ms. Arnst write such simplistic pap and while the health care companies mount their multibillion dollar campaigns against it. And after all, who can blame them? They've had a gravy train ride for the past 60 years. Why would they want anything to change now? Just so we could have a better, more efficient health care system in this country? Who would want that?

Cheney vs Obama: What doesn't make sense

2009-05-23T12:57:46Z

I've been following the recent public controversy between former Vice President Dick Cheney and President Barack Obama over national security, torture, the closing of Guantanamo and other issues, and there are a few things that don't make sense to me. Since nearly all of this kerfuffle is in speeches, no one ever gets an opportunity to say, "Hey, wait a minute," so I will do so here:

For instance, Dick Cheney says waterboarding is a valuable tool, one which has produced "a wealth of intelligence" on plans by Al Qaeda and which has kept America safe. What doesn't make sense? That the last time anyone was waterboarded was in 2002. If the technique is so effective, why did the CIA, or Dick Cheney, or whoever not employ it for the past 7 years? They've certainly had "high value" prisoners along the way; more have been added to Guantanamo, more have been captured on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002. Have none of these "insurgents" or "fighters" had any information worth pursuing?
]]> [My theory is that the horrors of the Abu Ghirab scandal in 2003 made those in the administration rethink the plusses and minuses of such techniques, realizing that those practices were a spectacular recruiting tool for Al Qaeda, and were not as effective as had been advertised to that point. But that's just a theory, of course.]

What else doesn't make sense? Dick Cheney (and now his daughter Liz) galloping around the country claiming that Obama is making the country less safe. It appears to me, since waterboarding wasn't used for the last six years of the Bush administration, that Obama, by outlawing it, hasn't done a thing differently than Cheney did for the last 3/4 of his administration.

Oh, there are lots of things which don't seem to make sense: claiming that waterboarding isn't torture at all, when Cheney's very own government has repeatedly prosecuted people for using it: not just as is famously known following World War II, but even during the Spanish American War in the late 1800's. An American soldier was courtmarshalled during the Vietnam war for employing the technique on a North Vietnamese soldier, and in 1983 a Texas sheriff was prosecuted for waterboarding some suspects until they confessed. How can it be torture for 100 years, and suddenly not be torture in 2002?

Another question: if it's so darned effective, why was it done to one person 183 times in a single month? Either it works or it doesn't. If it works, you might think that 183 times is about 180 times too many, wouldn't you? As yesterday's demonstration in Chicago demonstrated, one conservative firebrand talk show host lasted all of six seconds before (literally) throwing in the towel. Prisoners at Gitmo, of course, have "no towel" to throw in, so they would presumably be even more terrified, wouldn't they?

One more thing. If we can't bring terrorists into American Supermax prisons, what are we to think of the fact that we already have terrorists in American Supermax prisons? One report puts 33 international terrorists, many with links to Al Qaeda in one prison in Colorado. If I hadn't mentioned it, you probably wouldn't know. "Detained in the supermax facility in Colorado are Ramzi Yousef, who headed the group that carried out the first bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993; Zacarias Moussaoui, convicted of conspiring in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; Ahmed Ressam, of the Dec. 31, 1999, Los Angeles airport millennium attack plots; Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, conspirator in several plots, including one to assassinate President George W. Bush; and Wadih el-Hage, convicted of the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya." - Washington Post, May 22, 2009.

There are more than 300 others scattered around the prison system in the US (2/3 international terrorists, 1/3 domestic), but suddenly we can't put terrorists in prison? What's going on here?

You see my confusion? Waterboarding works so well, we haven't used it in years. Not waterboarding people makes the country less safe, except even the people who advocate using it weren't using it. Waterboarding is so effective we have to use it hundreds of times on the same person; why? Because he can't resist it? We can't put terrorists in jail, except we already have terrorists in jail.

But what doesn't make the most sense to me is why former Vice President Cheney is on this jihad to justify waterboarding, when none of the logic makes sense. And what doesn't make even more sense, is why Obama thinks he can close the door on all of this by "looking forward", instead of creating some sort of judicial, military, or Congressional panel to examine the whole sorry affair, recommend action if appropriate, and put the issue behind us. By refusing to do so, he only insures that it will continue to pop up in the future, which is exactly the opposite of what he says he wants. And that doesn't make sense, either.

A Personal Announcement

2009-05-20T01:00:52Z

Gay marriage has been allowed, or is about to be, in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Iowa, Connecticut and Maine, as well as the District of Columbia.

I have completed an in-depth survey with my wife, and after careful evaluation we have decided that our marriage has not been affected.

I will keep you up to date on this developing story.

The GOP turns Right. Again.

2009-05-09T13:28:10Z

So Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter has defected to the Democrats, opening a number of vacancies on Republican committees and subcommittees in the Senate. One of the most interesting and perhaps most important is on the Judiciary, where Obama's as-yet-unannounced appointee to replace Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court will be vetted.

In a drama as mysterious and worthy of the succession planning of the Politburo, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) emerged as the winner from among a pack of other Republicans, some with greater seniority, nearly all with more moderate histories. Sessions, denied his own judgeship back in the 1980's, is famous for his more colorful theories about the NAACP, which he called "unAmerican" and "Communist inspired", (because they forced civil rights "down the throats of people") and his forbearance of the Ku Klux Klan, which he said wasn't such a bad outfit until he learned that some of them smoked marijuana.

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The funny thing is that the Republicans had others from which to choose, so if Senator Sessions gets his (presumed) way and manages to block Obama's nominee(s), as he is sure to want to do, the Republicans will again be seen as the party of "no", standing in the way of government in their "principled stand" against getting anything done.

I'm assuming, of course, that the Senator will find any nominee put forth by Obama as "too liberal", largely because the Republican machine is already criticizing the nominees, even though they haven't been announced yet, and anyway, anything that comes out of the administration is subject to filibuster, hold, delay, or rejection (if possible.)

So far this strategy seems not to be working very well; the number of voters who identify as Republican continues to slide, the approval ratings of the President continue without pause in positive territory, and Republican moves to find a message, a messenger, or a cause seem as feckless as ever.

Perhaps the Republican march to the extreme Right is the answer, but so far it's led them only to ridicule and abandonment. It's difficult to see how the selection of Jeff Sessions from a group of several who are less inflammatory is likely to change that impression.

Toyota has a loss. A big one.

2009-05-09T12:57:22Z

Yesterday, Toyota Motor Corp announced its operating results for its fiscal 4th quarter: a loss of $7.7 billion, leading to a loss of $4.4 billion for all of 2009. That's a more than $20 billion swing in the wrong direction from the previous year.

Looking towards the next 12 months, management at Toyota said thing would probably be even worse.

Senator Bob Corker said he knew how to fix it: "Just get Toyota to reduce salaries of employees down to less than what the UAW makes. The trick is to keep cutting wages until workers in America can compete effectively with peasants in China, working in sweatshops for $4 a week without health insurance or pesky environmental regulations."

OK, he didn't really say that. But remember just a few weeks ago when he held out Toyota as the model of the car company that GM should aspire to be, and that the way to get there was to chop American wages? Maybe there's just a little more to it than that.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but in GM's most recent quarter they lost $6 billion. In Toyota's they lost $7.7 billion. I'm sure Senator Corker has noticed, but the funny thing is, I can't find a single quote about it from him.

The government pushes Texas around. Again.

2009-05-04T21:54:28Z

Remember a couple weeks ago when Texas Governor Perry said that Texans were sick and tired of being pushed around by the Federal government, and if it didn't stop they might just leave?

Well, it's happened again.

Oh, wait, this time it's their own State Government doing the pushing:

The Texas Senate approved legislation on Monday that would limit tuition and fee increases to no more than 5 percent a year for most large universities. The legislation would also permit schools -- but not require them -- to establish a separate program allowing incoming college freshmen to lock in tuition rates and pay the same amount for four years.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/metro/6407209.html

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The Texas State Senate, I note, has 19 Republicans and 12 Democrats, for a voting edge of 61% to 39% to the Governor's party.

Those horrible Republican politicians, deciding for the free market what prices should be charged, when prices might be raised, how independent businesses should be run.

Maybe Governor Perry will threaten to secede from his own state?

For and Against the prosecution of torturers

2009-05-04T19:14:44Z

Apologists went on high alert at the idea of prosecuting Americans who engaged in the torture of captured enemy combatants, or in some cases non-combatants, or in some cases just people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. After all, the defenders said, it wasn't really so bad, and it worked, and above all it was legal. And more than that, it wasn't even torture!

Well, we know that some of the things which were done were, in fact torture. The Red Cross says so. The Geneva Conventions say so. Heck, the American government has repeatedly said so over the past 60 years. The idea that "it was legal" rests on the shaky foundation that somebody said it was legal, which is rather thin gruel given that you can find someone who will say almost anything about anything.

]]> pro and con articles in the Sunday News Sentinel was "Of course. Torture is illegal. You prosecute that which is illegal, because if you don't, you've given permission for anyone to do it anytime they like." In other words, we would have little standing to criticize Saddam Hussein for torturing people if we do it ourselves. We would have to recuse ourselves from the Milosevic trials. We would have to bring back to life those who we executed for doing it back in the 1940's.

And then I remembered Jerry Ford. He is the guy, we all remember, who handed Richard Nixon "a full free and absolute pardon...for all offenses against the United States..." At the time, I confess, I was aghast. Nixon had run the most corrupt administration in generations, worse, he personally conducted a criminal conspiracy from the Oval Office, suborned perjury, conspired to launder vast sums of cash, turned government institutions into instruments of his own petty vindictiveness, enlarged a war he had promised to end, and lied, without end, to the American people. Of course he should have been prosecuted.

With the benefit of years, I came to realize that Ford's pardon was probably the right decision; the country was wounded, not only by Nixon's anti-constitutional administration but by the divisive decade which preceded, including the endless prosecution and eventual loss of the Vietnam War. The last thing we needed was another three years of Nixon witchhunt; we'd already had three and it was enough.

[I have to say that Condi Rice's recent appearance on cellphone camera, claiming that "if it was authorized by the President it did not violate our obligations." strikes me as identical to Nixon's "if the president does it that means it is not illegal", so perhaps he should have been prosecuted after all, as object lesson for the future eh? I thought Rice smarter than that.]

Anyway, at least until last week I had come around to believing that Ford's action, which probably cost him re-election, was for the good of the country, and I have some similar misgivings now about proceeding on the "torture prosecution parade."

On the one hand, the list of low-level people in the CIA or the military who will stand up to their superiors and say "I alone have determined that your instructions are illegal" is likely to be vanishingly close to zero. On the other hand, if there are no standards, we can hardly hold ourselves up as the beacon of democracy and morality that we so like to.

So where does the fault lie? This is a thin tightrope we're walking; we don't, as Obama knows, want to spend the next two years in Congressional hearings with daily headlines about the horrors that went on in CIA prisons around the world as well as at Gitmo. The economy teeters. Afghanistan teeters. Pakistan teeters. Iraq teeters. The distraction would be worse, in an obviously different way, than the Lewinsky scandal which paralyzed the nation a decade ago.

On the other hand, I really really don't want to see the crumbs who took their marching orders as "find a way to make this legal" and did so get off scot-free. The triple-back flips with a double-twist they performed to make what was so clearly illegal legal demands investigation, and depending on those results, punishment or vindication. At some level it is the policy-makers more than the grunts to need to answer for these actions.

But doing it in open court would create a circus. Doing it in Congressional hearings would make it a 3-ring extravaganza. The only solution I can find, and one which likely will please no one is a secret panel, perhaps like the 9/11 Commission, which goes about and does its work quietly in the background, with legal powers of subpoena, and which delivers a balanced and in-depth verdict with recommendations for prosecution, if appropriate, or disbarment, if appropriate, or nothing, if appropriate.

To say, as President Obama does "We need to look forward" is to ignore the very real past and only encourages a repeat at some future time when passions again run high, and it is to abdicate the moral leadership of the world at a time when it is needed more than ever. Something must be done to demonstrate our recognition of our mistake, otherwise we have no moral platform from which to lecture the rest of the world on this issue.

I hope something can be done which addresses the issue without tearing the country apart at the same time. I wonder if that is possible?

Reopening I-40

2009-05-03T14:39:29Z

It seems like only a few months ago, doesn't it? Interstate 40 was closed so that some ill designed and decades old engineering could be reworked, exits made safer, the road widened, and traffic ameliorated.

When I first heard of the plan I was surprised, shocked, actually, that engineers would put up barricades, cleave the road and prohibit traffic for over a year. I'd not heard of that before, and I've done a fair bit of reading on the Interstate system.

[I'm enamored of it, respectful of Eisenhower for proposing it and pushing it through, and have used "The Interstate System" several times against the argument that "people always know how to spend their money better than government does." The Interstates did not magically fall from the sky, and this use of government muscle and money created the best - and most expensive - infrastructure project in the history of the world, with the attendant benefits for all including cheaper products and better jobs across America. But I digress.]

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Boston's Big Dig, the reconstruction of a section of I-93 which flows through the heart of the city, was fantastically costly; I visited friends in the city several times during the project and saw why. Some wags described the process as akin to performing open heart surgery on a patient who is playing tennis match at the time, and I wouldn't disagree. And, in the 1990's I lived in Chicago when the downtown sections of I-90 were reconfigured during a reconstruction project which lasted years, and millions, including me, suffered the inevitable traffic tie-ups, slowdowns, and general confusion and frustration of trying to get around during that project.

Well, to my surprise, the I-40 closure hasn't hampered me that much, although truth be told, I'm not one of those who needs to commute downtown a lot, so perhaps I have a more benign view than others. Piloting our RV down the narrow and twisting lanes where I-640 rejoins the old I-40 east of the city has been harrowing (to say the least), but once that ends I expect the jaunt to be that much easier - and saner - for whiteknuckled me, trying desperately to control 27,000 pounds of smokin' fiberglass and steel, next to oblivious you over in the adjacent lane.

I'm glad I didn't write that Op-Ed piece, the one telling TennDot how dumb their plan was; it seems the "temporary inconvenience" was not so inconvenient after all and the "temporary" is about to end. I'll reserve judgment until I drive it, but so far I have to give kudos to TennDot for making what could have been a painful process, well, not so bad after all.

Justice Souter must really hate it

2009-05-02T23:31:26Z

My sister-in-law is planning to retire from government work next month. She
went to work in Health and Human Services (then called HEW, I believe) in Washington, D.C. during Richard Nixon's administration, and she's been there ever since, working through Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and most recently Bush II.

Hopefully the list emphasizes that it's been Republicans and Democrats of every stripe across 40 years, and during that time she has worked her way up through the bureaucracy. Exactly what she does I wouldn't know, but she has led seminars and conferences at the White House, so I guess that's some measure of success in public servant world.

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I know, I know, she's a malcontent. Well, not so much. She's voted for Republicans and for Democrats, and she believes in good government, and government which helps people. But she was overjoyed when W left office, because it meant that she could, at long last, accept her retirement and open the job. It wouldn't have mattered if it was Obama or McCain, either would have sufficed.

Anybody notice that Justice Souter waited exactly 101 days into the Obama's tenure to announce his retirement? That seems a bit rushed, unless he's been sitting, waiting, hoping to get a replacement nomination unlike the ones being passed out during the prior administration.

Insiders say that Justice Souter has long been unhappy with the direction of the Court, and that the issue "which broke the camel's back" was Bush v. Gore in 2000, in which Souter thought the court decided on political expediency rather than the merits. True or not, the timing seems especially suspect. I can see Souter sending a message saying "I want out" and being asked "Could you wait until the 100 days are up? We have a bit on our plate at the moment."

He must have been anxiously waiting to quit, to get back to his beloved New Hampshire, chafing at the conflict between his personal desire and his public responsibility, to hold the seat open until a more thoughtful, rational selection process can be had.

My sister-in-law would be proud.

Journalists at the Baker Center, part 2

2009-05-02T13:19:04Z

So I have laid out my basic complaints in Part 1 of this series, that the Society of Professional Journalists' meeting at Knoxville's new Howard Baker Center was too elementary and too structured, and didn't deliver on the promise "Talk Back to the Media." Since my analysis is simply my own impression and not evidence based, I could be wrong about this, or everything, actually, but then that's what makes for a food fight.

"Too elementary", for example: it appeared to me that most of the people in the room were somewhat press savvy. I have no way to prove that, except that several of the people who did throw up questions were "recognized" by the panelists, so they must have had some reasonable exposure to the media. But the hypothetical "You get a tip on a story, do you rush it onto the air?" was just silly, even if it did foment a few minutes discussion on tweets and twittering.

Anyway, when the floor was finally opened to general questions, four or so were asked in the 11 minutes which the moderator reserved for the purpose. I had one of them. The questions, I mean, not the minutes. Well, the minutes too, now that I think of it.

I wanted to know if any of the panelists had thought very hard about "the future". It was another dippy question, I admit, (it didn't hew to the issue of "credibility", for one thing) because of course the panelists have considered what's coming, if only for their own survival. They must have, mustn't they? When I was in the media my company would get a group of us together at irregular intervals to brainstorm and speculate on such things, and I hoped that someone else had - and that they might have some thoughts on it, mere scribblings perhaps for those of us on the outside concerned about what is going on. I note that Westinghouse didn't fly us across the country out of journalistic altruism, the meetings were more "Where is the business going?" although the get-togethers served multiple purposes.

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In the 1980's television stations were fat, with big, bloated newsrooms, I-teams, happy-talk consultants, and when independent stations started newscasts there was competitive sales pressure (and competition for news viewers) and things got tight, but they "shifted around" more than disappeared. Likewise at the network level, where the Big Three networks were beleaguered by the explosion of commercial inventory available on all of cable, not to mention the arrival of CNN as a real news presence. Suddenly NBC had to justify the existence of a foreign bureau in Prague which might contribute two minutes of video every other week at the expense of four full time staffers.

But even as jobs disappeared, they reappeared somewhere else, if not perfectly "in kind" then at least "in like", generally full time and gainful employment, where people went through the motions of actual journalism: learning the ropes, the ethics, and the hardships of being the grunt, slogging to the police station early each morning to write down the previous nights' activities for the Morning Blotter column or newscast. Striving for balance, and writing your own predilections out of the story were virtues!

Comes now the 90's, leading to today, and everyone is under siege. Radio is cut to the bone. Traffic, weather, and even news is being outsourced to companies who will trade advertising slots for time-filling information of merely adequate quality. Television newsrooms are sliced ever thinner, and few News Directors can contemplate the resources necessary for an I-Team investigation or much of anything else but the monotony of the newsroom assembly line which produces each night's package of newsfotainment. The internet has created a world of infinite unsold commercial inventory, pinpoint ad targeting, and costs so trivial as to be almost meaningless. Corporate video news releases abound and many short staffed stations grab for them, happy in the knowledge that they will fill another two minutes of airtime; papers run cheery press releases, hagiographies, or self promoting paeans nearly unedited.

And newspapers. Ah, newspapers. Long the leading lights in news coverage, particularly in-depth news coverage, they sit and watch as their business disaggregates at the hands of webmasters a thousand miles away who ravage the cash cows of classified ads, car ads, employment ads, even display ads, coupons, and the rest of the unheralded newspaper back rooms which pay the freight for those in the front where the glamour still exists, tempered and morale-challenged though it must be by layoffs and cutbacks.

Unfortunately, I don't see the jobs being replaced in a meaningful journalistic sense, nor am I particularly enamored of much of what the internet has wrought. While there are a few "successes" and people who can make a living at it (Drudge, DailyKos, etc.) that seems a sharp price to pay for the destruction of thousands of jobs in newsrooms across America, the disappearance of actual daily newspapers on the doorstep, and the diminution of fairminded journalism in favor of rumor-amplifying, mudslinging, partisan ranting from a handful of fighting keyboardists in anonymous basements across the land.

You know, like me ;)

A few months back I gave one wild-eyed prescription for salvation, probably as dimwitted as any other, but at least it was an attempt. I hoped that the panelists at the Baker Center would have tossed an idea - or at least a thought - in the air, but my question landed with a thud. Only Jack McElroy of the KNS took the slightest stab and the other panelists went silent.

And that's a shame, because I fear for the future of newspapers and of journalism, and thereby the great locus of the Fourth Estate (read: investigation, illumination, communication; not just rewriting wire copy or reciting the same dreary traffic report 10 minutes later or forwarding other blogger missives with a snarky coment of their own) in this country. There is no way that newspapers can "save themselves rich." The capital costs are too great, the distribution costs immutable (absent the abandonment of newsprint), and the business model obsolete. Cutting distribution, downsizing the paper, slicing through the news staff; these are all temporary salves which cannot rebalance the equation.

The competition from the internet is unstoppable, but the economics of newspapering online not robust enough, and I fear we are in for a long, (at least I hope long) period of decline, similar to what happened to AM radio over the past 30 years.

Perhaps I worry too much. Newspapers, after all, existed for years as partisan rags funded by extremists or political parties bent on disseminating their patrons' zealous arguments. Heck, the Manchester Union Leader still does (among others!) But over time they morphed into, if not perfectly balanced, at least responsible and respectable community citizens, dedicated to the finer points of the journalist code of ethics. And when they failed, and they did, it was "a failure", not usually a purposeful flouting of conduct for convenience (although there are those, too. Hey! What profession is perfect?)

I wonder if the people running such partisan blogs, newsrunner headline services (Michael Silence, Glenn Reynolds, to mention two locals), or other similar low-budget high-tech sites will adhere to that code ("Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting," for instance. "Deliberate distortion is never permissible," for instance. "They should not oversimplify or highlight incidents out of context," for instance. [Please note that I am not taking shots at Silence or Reynolds, who seem to do a decent job at what they do. It's just that they are so clearly partisan and I find it difficult to reconcile the idea of "neutral journalism" with the headbanging that goes on in that kind of work. Then again, I don't think they seriously pretend otherwise, so it's a faint criticism. And, of course, there are similar websites of other political stripes.])

Ah well, the future of journalism. Perhaps it is Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann. Matt Drudge and the Daily Kos. Michael Moore and Ann Coulter. I note that centrist CNN in primetime is now in third-place, well behind Right Wing Fox (O'Reilly, Hannity), Left Wing MSNBC (Olbermann, Maddow), and is perilously close to landing in fourth, behind uberopinionated Nancy Grace and Lou Dobbs. The center is evaporating. The outermost ends of the political barbell are bulking up. We are becoming a dumbell media world, and I mean that in every possible sense.

Is the business of journalism leading - or reflecting? Where does it go from here? I would like to have had someone talk about it for a couple of minutes.

Feel free to comment below, or reach me by private e-mail at RickStarr11@gmail.com

Torture and Religion

2009-05-01T23:49:22Z

A new survey shows a correlation because a person's religiosity and their willingness to employ torture.

"The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey." - quote from the CNN story.

The survey shows that the group most willing to torture is "evangelicals." The group least likely to allow it is "mainline Protestants." Right behind them, saying it should never be used, is the group called "unaffiliated."

Asked why there seems to be a greater willingness among those with greater church going habits, one wag said "Well, we all know God's policy on torture, don't we?"

Got Leviticus?