Life and Deatherage Messages

Tonight

Matt Deatherage — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 08:39:35 GMT

…NBC premieres the most ill-conceived show in the network's history, The Tonight Show Without Conan O'Brien.

And that's saying something from the network of Supertrain, The Man from Atlantis, and Fear Factor.

The tag is the new department reserved for NBC and KFOR (Oklahoma City affiliate) exploits.

What I'm doing lately

Matt Deatherage — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:15:46 GMT

Earlier in the month I had a series of scheduled doctor appointments to check on the progress of my eventual deterioration and decay. I'm pleased to report that I am not decaying at any faster rate than would normally be expected for a person my age who more or less types for a living. Heart condition is stable, everything else is stable. We made one slight medication change that I'm starting to see some benefits from and will see more over the next few weeks.

With all of those tests and appointments out of the way, some people have asked what I'm currently doing. It boils down to this:

I'm writing code in a language I don't know, to massage data that I don't have into a format that hasn't yet been determined. This data will be imported into a database that does not yet exist, so it can be very quickly and efficiently categorized and grouped using an innovative new human interface that I haven't yet invented.

Oh, and I just bit my tongue, which is only newsworthy because I wasn't eating anything at the time.

Good times.

An update on the Red Cross in Haiti

Matt Deatherage — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:35:10 GMT

Last month, I encouraged you all to donate to Doctors Without Borders to help with the massive needs in Haiti, after an earthquake pretty much destroyed the impoverished nation’s capital city and killed an estimated 230,000 people, as many deaths as in the massive Asian tsunami in 2004.

I chose DWB because of long-standing reasons to avoid donating to the American Red Cross (ARC), but most specifically because in the days after the earthquake, DWB (or technically, MSF, Médicins Sans Frontières in their native French

was pledging to use donations from the linked page specifically in Haiti for relief efforts. The ARC's much-ballyhooed donation page specifically said you were donating to their general "international relief fund," not to Haiti relief, so they might spend the money in Haiti, or elsewhere, or not at all. Within a week, the situation had reversed, and I noted as much. I've removed the donation graphic from the left-hand side of the blog today because the DWB/MSF linked page no longer says anything about Haiti at all—it's just for general donations to the (quite worthy) organization.

A month has passed, and ARC has issued a "One-Month Progress Report for the American Red Cross Response." This is already more transparency than you could expect from ARC just eight years ago, but as some people are beginning to notice, there's a slight discrepancy in the numbers:

The American Red Cross has received approximately $255 million (as of February 10, 2010) for the Haiti relief and recovery efforts.

[…] To date, the American Red Cross has already spent or committed $80 million to meet the most urgent needs of earthquake survivors in Haiti. Aimed at immediate relief, approximately 69 percent of the funds committed thus far have been for food and water; 20 percent have been allocated for shelter; and the rest have been dedicated for health and family services. As the response progresses and recovery begins, the Red Cross will continue to support these priority areas and longer-term assistance initiatives.

In other words, the ARC has received $255 million for Haiti relief and recovery, but has only spent or committed to spend $80 million of that. That leaves a whopping $175 million that the ARC has received for Haiti relief that has not even been committed to projects in the country yet. That’s a metric shit-ton of money that will do a lot of good in Haiti if actually spent on recovery. As transportation infrastructure improves, it will become cheaper to get food and water into Haiti, so I’d guess $175 million is enough to provide basic food and water to tens of thousands of people for most of a year.

The $175 million question: why has ARC not “committed” this money to Haiti relief? Is it just because it’s not committed to specific projects? How long will it take to develop and fund these projects? Is this typical for other charities? Given ARC’s consistent past habits of collecting disaster relief money and spending a third or less of that money on relief for victims of that disaster, you have to wonder—and if the ARC truly is reformed and more transparent, they should answer them pre-emptively.

One more interesting note:

More than $32 million has been pledged through a record-breaking mobile giving effort in which people text “Haiti” to 90999 to donate $10. Thank you for enabling the American Red Cross to respond immediately and effectively as the needs on the ground evolve.

Note the verb changed: the money is not “received,” but “pledged.” That dovetails with news stories from last month noting that ARC won’t actually get the $10 from your text message until you have paid the cellphone bill for the period in which that message was billed, so anywhere from 30 to 90 days after you sent the text message. It’s possible that ARC was able to use those pledges to get no-cost credit for immediate relief efforts, or just deplete an existing fund with the assurance it would be rebuilt over a 90-day period, but it’s worth noting that ARC does not describe it as money they have. Still, 3.2 million people sending a $10 text message for help is an awesome thing that could very well change the way people around the world can individually respond to future disasters. It would be nice if the mobile carriers and credit card companies could work together to build a mechanism that would do this with much faster payment for just such emergencies. If it works out well, it could even become part of everyday commerce, provided it was secure enough.

That’s far afield from the point of people acting quickly and unselfishly to help disaster survivors, but let’s try to learn any lesson from this that we can, shall we?

Sources are experts, but experts are morons

Matt Deatherage — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:44:35 GMT

A lot of intelligent people seem to wonder how things like this can happen in the New York Times:

You might think it impossible for any newspaper — let alone the one-time “paper of record” — to run a story raising “accusations of scientific sloppiness” about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that never quotes a single climate scientist.

You might think it inconceivable that the NYT would base its attack on the accusations and half-truths provided by “climate skeptics, right-leaning politicians and even some mainstream scientists” where

The one climate skeptic quoted is the The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (TVMOB) — who pushes outright lies such as “There hasn’t been any global warming for 15 years” and who labels young people who disagree with him “Hitler Youth.”

The right-leaning politician is Sen. John Barrasso, who is so far out he tried to stop the gathering of intelligence on the national security threat posed by climate change.

The “some mainstream scientists” is in fact only Roger Pielke, Jr. (!!), who has a Ph.D. in political science, who has said, “I am not a climate scientist,” who — far from being mainstream on this subject — is a long-time critic of the IPCC who has been attacking scientists’ reputations for many years.

[Writer Elisabeth] Rosenthal doesn’t actually quote a single mainstream scientist attacking the IPCC.

The article provides much more information on how the criticism has very little to do with the subject being criticized, but it’s hard to miss the incredulity: how does this even happen? It’s like guys who never passed high-school algebra “debunking” global macroeconomics, or someone who can’t put an Ikea table together complaining that jet mechanics are doing it wrong. Why does the media pay any attention?

This baffled me about 13-15 years ago when MDJ was getting started, too. A major media outlet would run a piece about “beleaguered” Apple Computer that would be full of factual inaccuracies. I’m not talking about differences of opinion, like “that strategy will never work” or “this technology is too expensive.” I’m talking about basic factual errors: “The Mac can’t multitask,” or “nobody used TrueType fonts,” or “FileMaker is file management software.”

By the way, those aren’t made up. Those are all from Jim Carlton’s 1997 book about Apple, one MWJ thoroughly reviewed here. I think my favorite was where he thought—and told readers—that System 7 couldn’t open two files at the same time.

Re-reading that stuff took me to a different place. I wanted to explain a different point: the media doesn’t believe experts. Aside from Carlton’s book, I saw lots of newspaper articles that had basic facts wrong. Often, they’d come to the attention of real-life people who actually used Mac computers, unlike the writer or his sources. Those people, believing in the traditional model of the media, would write letters to the editor (and, in the traditional model, some of them would be profane) pointing out the error, often with source material.

In the traditional model, this would make editors double-check what their writers had written, and lead them to publish a correction if the article was wrong. What no one recognized—and too few recognize now—is that the traditional model had already died.

In the current world, reporters prefer aphorisms and heuristics to complex data. Thanks to the continued work of people who paint fans of Apple technology as “cultists,” their heuristic was that people who use the Mac are deranged cultists who can’t be trusted to speak truthfully about the technology they actually use. The only thing that changed this was Apple’s market success: many (most?) writers now use Macs, or know someone closely who uses a Mac every day, so it’s a lot harder to pass off complete fabrications as facts.

Nonetheless, if people who are clearly experts on a technology say that an article is wrong, leading to hundreds of letters, it makes it more likely that the writer and the editors will ignore them and write them off as cultists. In politics, if politician “A” spouts pure bullshit, most of the criticisms will be written off if they’re from people who aren’t in politician “A’s” party. The reporters don’t even care whether what politician “A” said is true or not—he said it, and that’s news enough for them. Oddly, people pointing out that politician “A” is lying through his teeth, somehow, is not news.

In other words, you are an expert in anything that you don’t actually know. If you’ve actually studied a subject area, reporters implicitly presume that you are “too close” to the subject to address it with the unbiased and objective manner that they imagine they alone possess. Or, in Dana Milbank’s world, only people who know nothing about cars should be allowed to repair them. Or something. Also.

But in re-reading Carlton’s tome, I’m reminded that unlike Elisabeth Rosenthal’s climate change article, sometimes reporters do interview actual experts in a field—and still get it wrong. In Carlton’s case, he talked to a lot of people who were intimately involved in the stories he covered, but he usually only talked to people on one side of a dispute. His coverage of TrueType mostly came from Adobe co-founder John Warnock. His analysis that QuickDraw GX was crippled from being tied to a new printing architecture came from the QuickDraw GX graphics architect who opposed linking it to printing from the beginning. His conclusions that the classic Mac OS should have been shelved in favor of the object-oriented “Pink” OS came from people involved in Pink, with little input from those who worked on the OS that actually shipped.

Finding real sources who’ll talk, on the record, can be difficult in stories like this—but having sources all from one perspective is, in some ways, worse than not having sources at all. That seems to be what happened to Rosenthal—she got sources saying there were problems with the IPCC consensus, but those sources all led her to confirming sources, not to any who disagreed. She missed the danger signs that made Climate Progress drop its collective virtual jaw: none of the sources disputing climate science were actual climate scientists.

Or perhaps she deliberately ignored that, just like people writing about Mac “cultists” deliberately ignore evidence to the contrary, telling themselves that those people are “too close” to the problem to see it. This is being too clever by half, overthinking your position. It’s not multi-dimensional chess. If a source says that a specific scientific discipline is wrong, you need a source who is a well-regarded (not widely-disputed) expert in that field to confirm or deny. If someone says “X” was the wrong decision, you can’t really accept it as gospel without talking to the proponents of “X,” especially if facts (and not just opinion) are involved.

Contrary to the world of big-time reporters, experts are experts for a reason. People who are close to something generally know more about it than people who are not. This is why Barack Obama can speak authoriatively on constitutional law and Sarah Palin can speak authoritatively about moose hunting, but the reverse is not true. The only people who don’t seem to get this are the ones explaining it to the world.

Strange thoughts

Matt Deatherage — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 06:10:32 GMT

Am I the only one who thinks that Craig Ferguson does not want the 10:35 PM time slot, and since Letterman has been on the air for nearly 30 years, that his successor at CBS will be Conan?

Ironic sales page of the day

Matt Deatherage — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:42:38 GMT

Uh-huh.

Show some love for the dominant late-night host and his new gig with the Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien Logo Unisex T-Shirt.

I take back some of the nice things I said about KFOR.

Matt Deatherage — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 03:52:21 GMT

More signs of the Lenocalypse

Matt Deatherage — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:16:25 GMT

Watch David Letterman's Tuesday night desk segment on the late night wars and you'll laugh your pants off. Then watch Leno's own clips from the same night (they're mercifully short) on the same page as he takes digs at Letterman and looks like he's about to take one at Conan O'Brien.

They're cold, they're not funny, and even Leno's own audience starts to boo as they see the Letterman/O'Brien punchlines coming. He's lost his own studio audience in this matter. And NBC still thinks he's going to return The Tonight Show to dominance?

American Red Cross redux

Matt Deatherage — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:25:33 GMT

Last week, I mentioned that the donation page at http://american.redcross.org/supporthaiti did not actually pledge to use any of the funds you donated in Haiti. Per long-standing ARC bait-and-switch tactics, those donations went to the general “international relief fund” that may have been spent in Haiti, or some other country, or not at all—a pattern the ARC has repeated with disasters for decades. Disaster strikes, collect money on it, spend very little of the money on relief for that disaster. As the official sister of this blog explained in 2004:

The September 11 scandal was not unique. Earlier that same year in San Diego, ARC spent only $7000 of over $400,000 donated for relief in the Alpine wildfires. Then in October, 2001, while collecting millions across the country for WTC relief, ARC spent less than 10 percent of earmarked money for wildfire relief as it should have been spent (and that may be generous, because there was almost no accounting done). ARC spent $3.9 million for wildfire relief efforts in 2003, and their accounting was better. But as late as October of last year, ARC refused to designate monies donated for wildfire relief to help the very people the money was supposed to help. It begs the question: How much money was actually donated for this relief in 2001, if so much more was accounted for in 2003? What kind of charity has administrative expenses of 33 percent?

Sadly, all three of the links involved are now not only dead, but not even in the Internet Wayback Machine. I read them at the time, though, and they support the points she made. ARC collects monies based on disasters, but puts them in general funds that then don’t get spent on those disasters. The language on the “Donate to Haiti” page last week was quite clear (to ARC’s benefit) that you were donating to the “International Disaster Relief Fund,” and that if you wanted it earmarked for Haiti, you had to either mail a check or walk it to your local Red Cross office and make sure they wrote down “Haiti earthquake relief only” to designate the funds. Otherwise, they’d spend (or not spend) it as they saw fit.

With today’s Indie+Relief effort from independent Mac software developers donating their proceeds today to various charities for Haiti disaster relief (including the ARC), I took another look at the Red Cross’s page. Lo and behold, the text has changed. It now says:

Your gift to the American Red Cross will support emergency relief and recovery efforts to help those people affected by the earthquake in Haiti. Assistance provided by the American Red Cross may include deploying personnel, sending relief supplies, and providing financial resources.

This still not saying that 100% of the money will go to Haiti, but it’s worlds ahead of last week’s statement that flat-out said the money might not go to Haiti relief at all. Similarly, I see that the Doctors Without Borders link in the earlier blog entry (and in this blog’s sidebar) now takes you to a page that says you’re donating to DWB’s “Emergency Relief Fund,” and it is similarly clear that the money might not be spent in Haiti. Last week at this time, the same link destination mentioned only Haiti.

To a degree, this is understandable: if the charities think they’ve already collected all they will need to spend to fulfill their mission in Haiti (like rebuilding hospitals and several months of emergency medical aid, in the case of DWB), it’s prudent but a bit off-putting to start directing donations into a “Haiti-Plus” fund in case something goes drastically wrong somewhere else tomorrow. And it makes more sense to do it in that order than to pull the what the ARC did, which is to direct it to the general fund first and only later start collecting Haiti-specific funds.

But the situation has reversed somewhat, and I should mention as much. Consider yourself informed.

One more thing on Leno

Matt Deatherage — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 07:14:46 GMT

It’s all but a done deal that Conan O’Brien will produce his last show on NBC in three days, and no later than after the Winter Olympics, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno will be back at 10:35 PM to fail spectacularly because Leno is both unfunny and damaged goods.

Leno and NBC both seem to be catching on to the latter part, because they’re doing damage control. From a recent New York Times story:

Mr. Leno described the series of events that led to his situation; they began in 2004 when, he said, an NBC executive came to his office and said the network wanted him to step down from “The Tonight Show” in five years even though he was still first in the ratings at that time. (Watch Mr. Leno’s on-air announcement from 2004 here.)

Mr. Leno said he agreed to the plan based on his unwillingness to “go through what we went through the last time,” when NBC chose him over David Letterman as host of “Tonight.”

At the end of the five-year period, he said, he was still No. 1 and NBC suggested he move to prime time after showing him charts and graphs indicating the audience would follow him to the 10 p.m. time period. …

OK, we need to interrupt here because this is, at best, half-true. Two and a half years ago, Leno staffers were making it known publicly that he wanted to renege on the deal. (You’d think the New York Times would know this because they linked to the piece.) Leno spent about a year before the announcement of his prime-time show openly threatening to move to FOX or ABC, just as he did in his monologue two weeks ago on the day it was clear his failure of a prime-time show would finally be terminated. NBC “suggested” he move to prime time because Leno had been threatening, in public, to go to another network and compete with The Tonight Show.

He’s not the “good soldier” here. Continuing with the current article:

He said that NBC had given him a two-year contract for the 10 p.m. slot. Now, he said, four months later, because of problems with NBC’s affiliated stations and low ratings, network executives informed him they were canceling his show but “told me you’re still valuable.”

“I said, I’m still valuable? You fired me twice.” The network asked him to move back to 11:35 for a half-hour show, with Mr. O’Brien to follow at 12:05 with “The Tonight Show.”

Mr. Leno said he asked whether Mr. O’Brien would go along with this plan and was told that NBC was sure that he would.

Mr. Leno said he agreed to the change—as he had to the move to prime time—because he wanted to protect the jobs of his staff members. …

OK, again, here we have a slight problem with reality.

Leno’s staffers were mostly those who worked on his Tonight Show, where Leno also lived before he got The Tonight Show (he was Johnny Carson’s “permanent guest host”). It’s a safe bet that most or all of the staffers already lived in Southern California then, much less now.

Conan O’Brien’s staff moved to Los Angeles, moved their families, bought homes, and moved their kids to new schools to take up the Tonight Show mantle less than one year ago. (Late Night with Conan O’Brien went off the air in February 2009; The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien started in late May. Late Night with Jimmy Fallon was ready to go in February 2009 because they had been preparing it for a year in Studio 6B, compared to Conan’s Studio 6A, now used for The Dr. Oz Show. No, I’m not kidding.)

Who do you think has a rougher time: the people who have lived in L.A. for 20 years who seek new work because a prime-time show got cancelled (as about 15 prime-time shows do each year), or the people who just moved from New York to Los Angeles on what seemed like the safest bet in television? The delay in announcing the end of Conan’s time at NBC is that he’s negotiating for more money for his displaced staff members, while NBC is now publicly bad-mouthing him for doing so.

According to Mr. Leno, the network learned that Mr. O’Brien would not accept the shift but he said he does not blame Mr. O’Brien at all, calling him “a gentleman and a good family guy.” He said he had never had any animosity toward Mr. O’Brien.

He added that the network’s decisions were driven by the fact that neither host had succeeded in the ratings and that NBC expected “us to help him and we didn’t.”

Again, a lie from Leno: Conan’s ratings are about what Leno’s were when he started, adjusted for the fact that for the first year-plus, Leno had no competition in late night. (The Tonight Show with Jay Leno started on May 25, 1992; The Late Show with David Letterman premiered on August 30, 1993.) And what’s more, Leno said as much publicly not six months ago:

As for his successor, Mr. Leno said NBC should not be worried at all about the early performance of Conan O’Brien on the “Tonight Show.”

“Conan is going through exactly the same thing I went through,” Mr. Leno said. He recalled being lambasted after he had been on for only a couple of months and the show went off for coverage of the Olympics. “ ‘I hope he never comes back,’ ” he said, recalling the kinds of comments directed toward him.

“Everybody goes through this,” Mr. Leno said. “It’s a rite of passage when you take over the ‘Tonight Show.’ ”

The only difference is that Johnny Carson had enough class to not take the prime-time gig when Leno’s manager forced him into retirement (yes, NBC offered), and to not try to take The Tonight Show back after 7 months.

This notion that Leno is just a good soldier who’s doing what the network says forgets the simple truth that Leno could say no. As Kimmel put it, he’s got like $800 million in the bank, and still does like 160 stand-up gigs per year to give him all the money he lives on, including for his Detroit-sized car collection. He led the late-night wars for about 14 years and does not have to go to whatever time-slot NBC tells him. He could just say no.

Obviously he’s not doing that, so either…

NBC is so truly unaware of how unfunny Leno is to anyone under 55, or so desperate for short-term ratings at the cost of long-term irrelevance, that they’re truly throwing everything they have at him to get him to stay, or

Leno is still threatening NBC to go to FOX or ABC (although ABC has said they don’t want Conan, they were always interested in Leno) if they don’t keep him on the air five nights per week, or
NBC executives are trying to destroy the company to profit from some illegal scam with Comcast or another buyer, or
Leno has photographs of Jeff Zucker with JonBenet Ramsey’s body.

None of these reflect well on NBC or Leno, and none of them leave Leno as the “good guy” he’s now presenting himself in a belated attempt to repair his shattered reputation. It doesn’t matter if he engineered this coup or not (though it still looks possible, and maybe even probable), because he could have ended it at any time by saying “No, I’m done, give Conan his chance.”

He obviously will not do that and wants everyone to forget it. I don’t think people will forget that, though. No one’s organized any protests in favor of Jay Leno, ever, anywhere. Younger viewers are through with Leno. They were starting to love Conan, so NBC is taking him off the air.

Conan’s blood may be on Jeff Zucker’s hands, but it splattered onto Jay Leno’s face. Good luck getting that damned spot out, Lady MacChin.

Proof that Leno is washed up

Matt Deatherage — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:00:48 GMT

Last night, Leno decided to do his painful and unfunny “10@10” celebrity-question bit with Jimmy Kimmel, who recently did an entire Jimmy Kimmel Live show “as” Jay Leno, complete with gray-haired wig, fake chin, and whiny voice.

Watch the video here.

Kimmel dismantled Leno on Leno’s own show. It was brutal, sharp, and hilarious.

The real problem for NBC is that Leno, after 18 years on The Tonight Show and 40 years in comedy clubs, had absolutely no idea how to handle Kimmel. Leno looked like Sarah Palin in a chemistry class. He was wooden or robotic, and clearly fuming at the very idea that a guest on his show was not in love with him. Leno seems to think he’ll be welcomed like Jack Paar returning to Tonight after a six-week censorship battle in 1960.

This one segment, alone, shows that either O’Brien or Kimmel is far, far more qualified to be a late night host in 2010 than Jay Leno. And the shits for NBC is that they apparently signed Leno to a new Tonight Show contract just hours before this was filmed, so they’re now stuck trying to unshit the bed. And they are trying, as Salon notes about this very clip:

Not that we’re conspiracy theorists or anything, but we note NBC’s clip of the whole fantastic contretemps … cuts off after the first minute. The link on Hulu (which worked this morning!) says it’s “currently unavailable.”

It’s working now—but cuts off after one minute, perhaps to try to pretend Leno didn’t just get his ass and ego handed to him on his own overpriced set. He could have walked away a hero by publicly refusing his old show, and now he’s going to destroy The Tonight Show with a chin full of hubris. Conan saw it coming and rightly said, “don’t get me involved in this.”

Go Coco.

Team Conan

Matt Deatherage — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 20:01:22 GMT

(Also: What Andy Said.)

NBC's current self-protocology with its late night schedule bothers me daily because I really like NBC's current late night schedule. I think Conan O'Brien's Tonight Show is the freshest thing that's happened to that franchise since Johnny Carson. I watch it nearly every night. The set is beautiful, Conan is significantly edgier than Leno ever was (though his comedy is too muted, apparently out of fear of offending a larger audience), and he works hard to sell every joke in the monologue. When soemthing falls flat, he does a little dance or something that reminds me of Carson's omnipresent Tea for Two soft-shoe when a joke fell flat.

The idea that this Tonight Show would end after seven months to return the franchise to the bitter, ossified, and unfunny Jay Leno is depressing beyond belief. Lots has been written about this elsewhere, but the basics are simple:

In 2004, NBC got Conan and Leno to agree that Conan would become the host of The Tonight Show in 2009 and Leno would retire. Conan had been at 11:37 PM (I'm only using Central Time because that's where I live) for eleven years, and was a marketable property. NBC wanted to keep both Conan and Leno, and got everyone's buy-off for Leno to end his Tonight Show after 18 years.
It's now abundantly clear that not only did Jay Leno have no intention of honoring this agreement, he didn't even think NBC had any intention of honoring it. Due largely to the normal antipathy towards Letterman and some NBC prime-time successes before the past two years, Leno had remained #1 in the 10:35 PM time slot. Despite having more money than God, he didn't want to quit working, and threatened openly to start a new late night show at ABC or FOX to compete with Conan after his Tonight Show ended.
NBC, somehow trembling with fear at this prospect rather than openly laughing at it, decided to give five hours of prime time per week to Leno to keep him at NBC, saying ratings didn't matter to them as long as the show as profitable. As it turned out, ratings did matter to the NBC affiliates. Leno's crappy show generated crappy ratings. Most local news is interchangeable, so people who watch it tend to watch whatever channel they were watching at 9:00 PM. That's not Leno, so NBC affiliate local newscasts are tanking, with some seeing ratings as high as 40% or even 50% lower than a year ago.

(NBC should have seen this coming when the Boston NBC affiliate publicly stated that it would not even carry Leno's show six months before it went on the air. NBC smoothed it over and failed to take a hint that even Sarah Palin couldn't have missed.)
With NBC now agreeing to be purchased by Comcast (really?), affiliate objections could cause problems getting the merger approved. So NBC has wisely cancelled The Jay Leno Show. And yet, still stuck in 2003, they're terrified of Leno going to FOX (ABC says it's happy with its late night lineup) and want to keep him—so they want him back at 10:35 PM. They offered to let Conan continue to host something called "The Tonight Show" for an hour starting after Leno, at 11:05 PM (12:05 AM ET/PT, so not even technically "tonight" anymore), or they told Conan he could just leave and they'd give The Tonight Show back to Jay Leno.
Conan, in a statement worthy of the ages, says that The Tonight Show is defined by its 10:35 PM timeslot, that moving it to "after another comedy program" would destroy it, and he has no interest in doing that. So now, NBC and O'Brien's camp are widely reported to be negotiating to end his contract (i.e., does NBC have to pay him the huge penalty fee for not keeping him as host of The Tonight Show, would it have been The Tonight Show at 11:05 any more than it would still be Today if it aired at 2 PM, etc.).

The simple truth, of course, is that Leno is the past for The Tonight Show, and Conan is the future. Conan's ratings are no worse than Leno's were shortly after Letterman started (and there was real competition for the first time), but in just one month of hosting Tonight, he dropped the median age of a Tonight Show viewer by ten years, from 55 to 45. The strongest demographic for the networks is 18-34; 18-49 is probably second. 55-year-old viewers are not worth nearly as much, and that's who Jay Leno draws.

How stupid must NBC be to believe that this aging and thinning Leno viewing herd will follow him to FOX, the network of Family Guy and Our Little Genius (if it ever gets on the air after its ethical problems)? FOX has no 9:00 PM network programming, and most FOX stations broadcast local news during that hour, and syndicated programs afterward. Who really believes that FOX stations currently filling the 10:00 PM hour with reruns of Family Guy, The Simpsons, South Park, and Punk'd will give up 100% local ad revenue for a split with a network show featuring a bitter, unfunny guy who attracts the John McCain crowd? (FOX is not Fox News; FOX runs programming that "Fox News" would bitterly criticize were it on any other network.)

Not to mention that for younger viewers, Leno is now irreparably damaged goods. They weren't watching his show before, and now his need for fealty is causing NBC to unceremoniously dump Conan, whom they were watching. Leno clearly looks like the evil manipulator in this because instead of taking the cancellation of his risky prime-time experiment with aplomb, he's openly threatening to change networks, demanding that NBC break the deal he agreed to, so he can ossify late night for however long he wants to stay there, which could be ten more years or could be ten more months.

Now Conan moving to FOX is a different matter entirely. He was a writer and producer on The Simpsons during some of its most-beloved seasons. His humor dovetails with FOX's normal kind of humor except Conan's involves fewer body fluids. 75% of Leno's "funniest" bits are him going out on the sidewalk and laughing at how stupid people are. Even when Letterman does similar bits, he's always disappointed when people don't know basic facts about the country or the world. Leno is positively tickled, thrilled at stupidity. He celebrates it, elevates the dumbest people he can find to instant celebrity status, openly hoping that they never become more than the next Heidi or Spencer. Even on American Idol, the bad singers aren't told that they should change nothing and deserve to be famous. They're told they can't sing. Did you ever see Leno tell someone to go learn something?

Leno has been on NBC for 19 years; Letterman has been on CBS for over 16 years after doing The Late Show at NBC for 11 years. It's extremely unlikely both of them will be hosting late night in 10 years, and somewhat unlikely that both will be hosting in 5 years. Or, God forbid, they could get hit by a bus; Letterman could have more heart problems; Leno could be eaten by his own chin, etc. In The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, NBC has a legitimate long-term late night show that is ready to withstand all those travails.

And after spending about $20 million to get it started, NBC appears willing to flush this long-term late-night success down the crapper—after only seven months—in the completely asinine believe that Jay Leno would succeed at FOX even if he made the move. They're going to kick out the younger, hipper comedian with the younger audience and entirely expected ratings in favor of the damaged, bitter, unfunny guy who at best could hold on to a minor late night lead for a few more years.

This is why I don't watch new shows on NBC unless I have a really good reason to do so (like Joel McHale in Community). NBC fucks up everything if given the chance. If they're in first place, they can leave well enough alone. As soon as there's the slightest nick in the armor, though, they start doing "something" rather than doing anything smart. They spent a fortune on Studio 60 and didn't let it build an audience like they did The West Wing, and caved to mendacious critics who didn't like the picture of TV it presented. After one season of Heroes (which I refused to watch because of Studio 60, they tried to turn it into two series for a total of like 43 episodes for the second season, foiled only by the writer's strike and by giving the show to runners who nearly killed it. Their best new show of the past two years was Southland, so of course they killed it. They'd really like it back now that they have five hours of primetime to fill in just five weeks, but TNT picked it up, so they're—well, they're NBC.

The new comedy Parenthood looks funny, but it's going to be on NBC, so watching it will only bring heartbreak. I didn't pick up Chuck for similar reasons. I was considering joining it this season, given all the good reviews from friends, but then Operation Fellate Jay Leno started and ended any hope of that. It's ironic that for years, I didn't want to watch new NBC series because KFOR, the local affiliate, had the worst SD picture in OKC and would drop the NBC HD feed during the slightest breeze to fill the screen with ridiculous graphics. Now KFOR is broadcasting local news in HD (still can't record and play it back later, though, so syndicated shows, delayed network shows, and even repeats of their own newscasts are still in SD), has improved their SD picture to be at least on par with the other stations, and generally has an incredibly beautiful picture—and as soon as that happened, NBC fucked up the quality of the programming. A beautiful high-def picture of Jay Leno is the definition of polishing a turd.

(The funniest thing anyone has yet said about this was Conan's opening joke in Wednesday night's monologue:)

You know, I'm trying very hard to stay positive here. And I want to tell you something, this is honest: hosting The Tonight Show has been the fulfillment of a lifelong dream for me—and I just want to say to the kids out there watching: You can do anything you want in life.

Unless Jay Leno wants to do it, too.

Leno still has time to become a hero by walking away and not going to another network, but just doing the stand-up he apparently loves and being the "elder statesman" that Carson was and Leno has never shown the capacity to be. NBC can be the heroes by letting Leno walk even if he does go to FOX. And honestly, I would have loved The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien at 11:05 because then I could watch it after The Daily Show and The Colbert Report with no overlap, but I know that much of the audience doesn't work that way. I would not think badly of Conan at all if he changed his mind, especially since dozens of his staff also moved to Los Angeles with him and will now be stuck in the State of Ungovernability with mortgages and no jobs. That's also a hero move, but it does nothing to undamage NBC or Leno.

But if The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien ends, I'm following Conan wherever he goes. I will not watch Leno even if he has the second coming of Jesus Christ himself (though Leno probably thinks he can do that interview with just a mirror). I will not watch new NBC shows because I expect the network to fuck them up, and I don't need to make time in a busy day to watch something that's just going to get yanked away after a short run. In terms of brand equity and history and good feelings, NBC has always been my favorite network. If NBC loses Conan, they'll be somewhere around "The CW" to me.

I watch one show on "The CW" (Smallville) and have no desire to watch more. I'd still watch Community and 30 Rock (for now), but that's it for me and a Conan-free NBC. Conan is the best move in late night in 10 years. If they can't see that, there's truly no hope for anything they do.

Better donations for Haiti disaster relief [updated X3]

Matt Deatherage — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 20:23:38 GMT

Update 3: The situation about where donated money is directed with the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders has reversed itself, as explained in this separate update. I’m leaving the DWB links in this post due to the ARC’s long history of misdirecting donations, but noting that Doctors Without Borders now explicitly states that donations are to an “emergency relief fund” that may be spent in Haiti or elsewhere.

Update 2: I donated $20 to Doctors Without Borders. I can’t really afford it, but they can’t afford it more. Please help with the relief.

Long-time readers may remember my exhortations to avoid donating to the American Red Cross, because they are a profit-making organization that still has very little accountability. Their URL for Haiti donations, http://american.redcross.org/supporthaiti (you can cut and paste if you want it), goes to a page that donates not to a Haiti relief fund, but to the ARC’s general “International Response Fund.” They may use the money in Haiti, they may use it somewhere else, or they may bank it or spend it on office equipment like they did with 9/11 disaster funds.

After that controversy, they’ve at least been smart enough to make the small text on this donation page clearer:

If you wish to designate your donation to a specific disaster, please do so at the time of your donation by mailing your donation with the designation to the American Red Cross, P.O. Box 37243, Washington, D.C. 20013 or to your local American Red Cross chapter.

So not only is the minimum donation $10, you also cannot donate online and have it reserved for use in Haiti relief efforts. You must either mail your check or drop it off in person at a Red Cross chapter to force them to use it in Haiti, or for that matter, to use it at all.

As with Hurricane Katrina, though, Presbyterian Disaster Assistance has already started a Haiti-specific fund to which you can make secure online donations. They also link to a donation form for Church World Service specifically to “help the people affected by [the Haiti earthquake] as Church World Service works ot provide life-saving supplies now and essential assistance as they rebuild.” The bottom of that page lists CWS’s charitable credentials as one of “America’s Most Efficient Charities.”

Unlike the Katrina situation, this fund is not segregated from assistances to Presbyterian (or, presumably, other denominational) churches in Haiti, at least as I write this. However, I don’t think there’s much of a significant Presbyterian presence in Haiti anyway, so it’s not like there’s a lot of church to rebuild. The Quixote Center is not affiliated with any church or denomination, works on the ground in Haiti, and is dedicated to social justice; they also are soliciting Haiti-specific relief donations.

All of these are, IMHO, better donation options than the American Red Cross, who freely admits that donations made on their page may not be spent in Haiti or spent at all—and history shows that if they’re not forced to spend disaster relief donations on a specific disaster, they keep it for their own projects.

The American Red Cross paid its CEO $565,000 during the last reported year, and requires you to opt-out if you don’t want it sharing or selling your contact information. The Quixote Center doesn’t list the president’s salary, but the co-directors all got salaries of under $40,000 for the last reported year, and also requires opt-out.

Presbyterian Disaster Assistance is not listed at all, but the church says that “The total for salaries, benefits, administration, information and interpretation represents just 4% of the PDA budget,” and promises that at least 95% of designated funds will be used to help those in need, with the rest going to “cover shared administrative costs associated with the processing and distribution of your gift.” (Keep in mind that credit card fees eat up at least 2.5% of the donation before PDA ever sees it.) I can’t find information about an opt-out policy, but after a donation several years ago, I can tell you they’re still pretty good about staying in touch via US mail.

Do help if you can, but try to give it to a charity that is on the record as actually using your gift for the purpose you intend. That ain’t the American Red Cross.

Update: Nobel-laureate humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders lost all three of its Haitian hospitals in the earthquake. They are on the ground in Haiti, setting up clinics, and are accepting directed donations for Haitian disaster relief. They’re also very open with their financial information if you want to give it a look-see.

Small caps or not?

Matt Deatherage — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 23:26:07 GMT

Following news earlier today that a font designer changed the old-style “1” in his font because Al Gore noticed it was too confusing with the “I” in his new book, Joe Clark argues that using small caps for acronyms in the first place is old-style thinking:

This nonsense, promulgated by snobs like that bore Bringhurst who have not read anything written after Jane Austen croaked, ostensibly improves typographic colour. What it actually does is inhibit reading: Acronyms are not regular words. All-small-caps setting fools the reader into thinking an acronym is a real world. That discomfort you feel is a reverse fixation you underwent trying to reread the word.

Bringhurst is the author of The Elements of Typographic Style, considered by most amateurs (including me) to be an invaluable manifesto of what to do, or at least to what you should aspire, when putting letters together. Section 3.3.2 of that book says “For abbreviations and acronyms in the midst of normal text, use spaced small caps.”

Surprisingly, that section doesn’t exactly explain why, but the idea is logical. All uppercase text stands out when reading, both altering the typographic “color” of the page and making speedier readers pause. The idea is that a brand name like “BMW” is not more important than the rest of the words around it (BMW’s marketing department notwithstanding), so it should not be taller and “blacker” than the other words. Capital letters should draw attention to the beginnings of sentences and to proper nouns, not to abbreviations or acronyms.

Having been an old Apple IIgs guy, where the “gs” is supposed to be in small caps, I’ve always remembered this. And we tried to use it for a while in MDJ and MWJ, but…no. It just doesn’t work. For starters, there are no small caps in ASCII/Unicode, so it would come out “IIgs” anyway. Second, if we ever publish in HTML, we still have little control over the browser and font technology used, and most small caps directives are either ignored or shrunken larger capital letters that look out of place, like this: Apple IIgs. That draws attention to it worse than “Apple IIGS” would.

And that’s really the kicker: Clark points out that in today’s technocratic world, you simply can’t put abbreviations and acronyms in small caps because they wind up looking worse. Plurals should not have apostrophes, but without them, you get abominations like bmws. Unless your font has excellent old-style numerals, you wind up with really strange letter heights in names like “Mac os x 10.6.2” or “Mac os 9.”

A couple of years ago, I tried a test that would use oldstyle numerals and small caps wherever possible, but compared to the traditional “regular caps” way, it just looked weird:

In this particular example, it only looks weird-weird in phrases like “Apple hdv Codec” and “dvd Studio Pro.” Worse was realizing exactly how much work it would take on every item to think about which acronyms and abbreviations would look decent in small caps, and which would not. MDJ’s body font is Minion Pro, which has a nicely drawn set of small caps. The headline font is Myriad Pro, which does not, so those have to be faked manually whenever they’re needed. Plus, it’s lexically weird: as you can see if you view source, the literal text behind “dvd Studio Pro” is “dvd Studio Pro,” which would then need upshifting for every venue that doesn’t have small caps (like E-mail).

I agree with the intent that capital letters should not draw attention to acronyms and abbreviations, but in today’s world, trying to use small caps instead winds up bringing them more attention, defeating the entire purpose of the guideline. In the image above, the paragraph on the left reads well enough and can be reused as is in other formats. The one on the right took longer to prepare, still looks funny in some places, and needs upshifting for text-only media without small caps.

There’s just no point to signing up for extra work if it doesn’t accomplish the goal for doing it in the first place. But it would be nice if abbreviations and acronyms could appear more elegantly everywhere.

Why I think I'm done.

Matt Deatherage — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 02:27:18 GMT

I’ve been reading the progressive Web since it was born. I think I’m UID #16 on Daily Kos almost by accident, but I’ve been around at least that long—I was reading Kos before the Scoop site started. The first post on here I can identify as progressive is #19, from November 11, 2001, long before I even had categories or anything like that.

I’ve been paying closer attention to politics since (surprise) the 2000 Presidential election, because it suddenly seemed like “Rule of law! Rule of law!” was defined as “whatever Republicans say it is,” and of course, that’s what happened for eight years. On top of one national atrocity after another (whoever placed a bet at Lloyd’s of London in 1999 that said “Torture becomes official U.S. policy before end of decade” has won a bunch of money), the craziness here in Oklahoma was getting crazier and crazier. I was watching to make sure they didn’t pass a law that says “gay people can’t live within 50 yards of indoor plumbing, with 10 years imprisonment upon first offense,” because you know it’s the kind of stuff they want to pass. Sally Kern has made no bones about her agenda.

But other than offer my voice, there is little I can do about any of it. I am not and never will be a viable candidate for any political office. (If nominated, I would not run, etc.) I do not aspire to be a “pundit” of any kind, not even really about the Macintosh or Apple. (People shouldn’t believe anything I say just because I say it. They should look it up and decide for themselves.) All I can do is keep up with the news, offer opinions on the subject, and hope that in some small way they shape opinion somewhere, and something gets done.

I no longer believe that has any quantifiable chance of happening.

Despite clear evidence that Sen. James Mountain Inhofe is not only incompetent but dangerous and driven by hate and spite, Oklahomans re-elected him one year ago by a huge margin. He’s since spent the past year making the state into a further laughingstock, promoting policies that hurt Oklahomans and the planet, while sanctimonously issuing spittle-flecked hatred that it’s his opponents who want to kill everyone.

The other senator, Tom Coburn, is just as bad. He says that providing people with health insurance will kill them. He says Nelson’s extortion to keep women from having a legal medical procedure that he himself has performed numerous times (including the time he went beyond the patient’s wishes and sterlized her without her consent) is “throwing unborn babies under the bus,” presuming by ripping them out of the mothers who want them (and don’t have healthcare), or something. He’s obstructed and blocked at every opportunity, including delaying key funds for the troops he allegedly supports.

And he will probably cruise to re-election victory next year because none of this gets reported in OKC or Tulsa. It just disappears down the memory hole. Inhofe, Coburn, Kern, and other dangerously radical John Birch conservatives pull stuff like this every day, and it never ever makes the local news, nor does it make the newspaper unless it’s excused in some fashion. Again, for those who don’t remember, I’ll remind you that the previous Democratic governor of Oklahoma was attacked by the same media for imagined offenses from day one, to the point of driving his son to suicide.

I’ve pointed out many times that there will be no progress in Oklahoma until there are progressive voices heard in Oklahoma, but I’m pissing into the wind. Those who have the ability do not have the energy or the resources; those who might have the resources are incapable or unwilling to use them. There is no pushback against the Oklahoma media with any traction, and so Inhofe and Coburn are hailed are responsible politicians and 90% of Oklahomans will never know any different. Not even the Oklahoma Democratic Party will attack these America-haters, and if they do speak out against them, their tone is barely confrontational and almost apologetic at times. If Oklahomans like one thing, it’s someone who fights. Oklahoma Democrats don’t fight.

On the national scene, we’ve been told that nothing good can happen until Democrats controlled Congress. That came to pass in January 2007, and nothing happened, so we were told Democrats needed the White House and not just a House majority but a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. That came to pass in 2009, and…nothing happened. Instead, as you know, the history of health care reform in the Senate has been for the Democrats to start with their compromise position and then give all of that away to preening assholes like Joe Lieberman or Ben Nelson. The result from the Senate is a bill that is so watered down that I am not convinced it will deliver any of the reforms it promises. It does not “provide health care” to 30 million uninsured people. It requires them to purchase that insurance, from private companies, with no cost controls, and without subsidies to cover them. It’s like forcing every renter to have renter’s insurance without making sure affordable insurance is available.

At this point, I can’t see any evidence that it matters whether the Democratic leadership is unable or unwilling to maintain party discipline. The result is the same—they told us they’d deliver initiatives if we gave them the most incredible majorities of five decades. We did that, and they not only didn’t deliver, they’re mad at us for expecting them to deliver on it.

I’d love to fix this, but I can’t. Even when I’m absolutely sure of what would work better than the status quo, I have only the most marginal of voices that gets no attention. It doesn’t bother me that this blog gets no traffic (the server doesn’t need the strain). When these topics (especially about Oklahoma) have come up in other places, I’ve posted or commented in those places and explained what’s going on. And I get ignored. I don’t get argued with, I don’t get agreed with, I get ignored. It’s as if I never said anything, as if my comment wasn’t even part of the thread. That doesn’t happen anywhere else. My comments on food blogs, technology blogs, entertainment blogs all get some kind of response. On progressive blogs, it’s been a complete waste of energy.

I mean, it wasn’t always as bad as the last time I tried to post a diary at Daily Kos, but take a look at the last diary I did post there. It got 11 comments, which is a lot for something I post there. It was about the Oklahoma Bank[st]ers Association running TV ads against health care reform, and was a modest attempt to get people with louder voices to pick up on this and put some pressure on them to stop it.

So what did I get? About two comments on topic, three insulting Oklahoma, and the rest just marginally related, like “OK is not a safe place for WOMEN!!” and “that guys has a funny name.” And that, folks, is the cream of the crop when it comes to reaction for anything I’ve said on progressive causes in the past eight years.

The most-read message in the history of this blog is this one, and it was wrong: it was my instant-reaction belief that the Bush Justice Department deciding not to prosecute Contempt of [Democratic] Congress would be seen later as that administration’s equivalent of the Saturday Night Massacre. It’s been read over 33,700 times, and more than 22,000 of those happened in the first 24 hours because it got linked on Reddit not long after it was posted. (I was thrilled to realize that the server could handle the load, honestly.)

I can’t complain that no one read it. But—nothing happened. Just a couple of weeks later, the entire incident had itself gone down the memory hole, like everything outrageous that any Oklahoma Republican does.

It’s extremely difficult to argue, given all this evidence, that anything I’ve done for progressive causes has made the slightest bit of difference. As the new workflow takes shape, and the limitations on work hours become clearer than they were even a year ago (not that there would be limits, but what they have to be for a sustainable workflow), I have to give up those things that both take a fair amount of time and that don’t seem to be accomplishing anything.

Participating in progressive politics seems to be #1 on the list.

I understand casual visitors will write this off as another “GBCW” missive, which it’s not, but that’s how it goes. If I’m going to take an hour to say something, then unless it’s just a personal vent, it needs to make a difference somewhere. It needs to bring a perspective that’s not being offered, or information that people can use, or just something that makes it more than a vanity exercise. Yet every piece of evidence I can muster says that my political opinions are the very definition of a vanity exercise. I simply can’t afford to indulge that any longer.

So I’m going to try giving it up. It may be like saying “I’ll give up football,” and I discover in a few weeks that I’m really hooked and can’t shake it, but I’m gonna try. I’m about to archive the couple of dozen progressive news feeds I read, including several I’ve read every day for about eight years, and remove them from NetNewsWire and from “Top Sites” in Safari on the machine I use to read things when the big machine is busy. I’m dropping the progressive podcasts that I rarely listen to and giving up on Countdown (which is more polemic than enlightening anymore) and Rachel Maddow (because it’s just too depressing). I think I’ll miss Atrios most of all.

I know I can always go check them out on the unlikely chance something good happens, but I can’t keep getting emotionally involved in these things despite evidence that it has zero impact. I’m just going to try to do the things I’m good at doing, until and unless the Congress or the Legislature passes some law that makes it impossible for me to live freely where I choose. If that happens, I’ll leave Oklahoma or go to jail or whatever limited options remain to me at that point.

But in this place, at this time, there is nothing I can do to help, and plenty I should be doing in areas where I can make a difference. I just have to cross my fingers and hope that Sally Kern doesn’t manage to get all gay people imprisoned as she so fervently hopes. I can do no more.

The next play in healthcare

Matt Deatherage — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 21:27:38 GMT

[all in my humble, non-professional opinion, which is worth exactly what you paid for it]

The next play in the healthcare debate is to head to the freepers, teabaggers, and other IGFMY'ers and find their comments on the reproductive health language from Stupak and Nelson. It's incredibly easy to show that these folks find this "compromise" intolerable because it doesn't ban all abortions everywhere and execute everyone involved in thinking about one. This only convinces the Villagers that this is a "bipartisan" compromise, but it should show the Democrats that the teabag right is infuriated by it and is out for Ben Nelson's head (as if they weren't anyway, because he's a Democrat).

It shouldn't take much more effort to find some people commenting about how at least this will keep the "freeloaders" of defined minority groups (perhaps profanely defined) from getting "free abortions," so it's at least a start. Highlight these comments and make defenders disown them.

You may say this is "nutpicking", but there are some significant differences:

The right does this kind of thing all the time, and it's therefore easy to call them on it if they complain about it now. Granted, the wingnuts don't seem to have the "shame" gene to kick in when they openly and loudly advocate that a given action is only bad when others do it, but it makes the people trying to limit reproductive rights go on the record as saying that keeping it out of the hands of poor folk is not their intention. That infuriates the right even more, negating any political benefit the Stupaks and Nelsons had from trying this gambit.

It then shifts the conversation to "If that's not it, then what is this amendment really all about?" When they come back with "no federal money for abortions," even the Villagers know that the amendment doesn't do that—the Hyde Amendment from way back when did that, and health insurance reform did nothing to change that.

Even the Villagers know that this amendment prevents people who obtain insurance on the new exchanges from having abortion coverage even if they buy it with their own money. It's not that they "have to buy a rider," it's that they can't buy a rider if the policy is sold on the exchange. It's taking a fully legal medical procedure and refusing to let those most in need of health insurance get insurance for that procedure because a bunch of people either think it's "icky" or say it's against their religious beliefs, and therefore you should not be allowed to do it.

I don't know if any of this is enough, or even close, to stop the bill, but you can't win the game if you don't play.

Oh, and once the bill is passed? Bart Stupak loses every day of his seniority in the House and becomes the most junior Democrat in the caucus. Period. No negotiation, no exceptions. He's coordinated with the Senate GOP to block this bill, in addition to his own attempts in the House to torpedo the party's biggest policy initiative of the past three decades. The tent is not that big. If he goes to the Republicans, and takes five or ten blue dogs with him, let them go. It's better to have an opponent than a saboteur.

IMHO.

Senate Judiciary Approves Shield for All Journalists

Matt Deatherage — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 21:54:20 GMT

I’ve been on record for a while as being opposed to a “shield law” for journalists, for a very simple reason. A shield law says that a journalist cannot be punished for refusing to provide information under subpoena, in the theory that it would compromise confidential sources and reduce the value of a free press.

I agree with that goal. The problem is that anyone in the world can head to wordpress.com or blogger.com and start a blog, and then argue that he or she is a “journalist.” And, in fact, many people I consider online journlists started exactly that way. But if everyone is a journalist, then no one can be made to testify under subpoena. Someone posted your password to an E-commerce site online and people drained a few thousand dollars out of your bank account before you knew it? Too bad, can’t sue—the person who posted it doesn’t have to answer a subpoena to say who leaked the information, since he was a “journalist” and the person who stole your financial information was a “source.”

If you’re going to say that any class of people is exempt from subpoena power, you must define that class clearly or else everyone is exempt from subpoena power. The good news is that I think the bill out of the Senate actually manages to do that:

Under this bill, a journalist is someone who:

with the primary intent to investigate events and procure material in order to disseminate to the public news or information concerning local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest, regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports or publishes on such matters by—

conducting interviews;

making direct observation of events; or

collecting, reviewing, or analyzing original writings, statements, communications, reports, memoranda, records, transcripts, documents, photographs, recordings, tapes, materials, data, or other information whether in paper, electronic, or other form;

has such intent at the inception of the process of gathering the news or information sought; and

obtains the news or information sought in order to disseminate the news or information by means of print (including newspapers, books, wire services, news agencies, or magazines), broadcasting (including dissemination through networks, cable, satellite carriers, broadcast stations, or a channel or programming service for any such media), mechanical, photographic, electronic, or other means.

[This definition, incidentallly, is based in large part on the Second Circuit’s 1987 decision in von Bülow v. von Bülow, and, yes, those von Bülows.]

I think it’s “ii” above that makes the difference. It does not grant the shield (subpoena exemption) to people who were not trying to commit journalism but stumbled across something that would damage an enemy and decided to spread it online, then claim “journalist!” to avoid responsibility for his or her actions. It makes the key distinction that a journalist is someone who was trying to report the news from the beginning.

The summary above is from a Daily Kos post, and the linked text of the actual bill does not include this specific language. In fact, it’s missing the key section about having the intent of engaging in journalism at the inception of the process. If that’s missing from the final bill, I say that’s a fatal flaw. The current bill text on Thomas defines “journalism” as:

JOURNALISM—The term ‘journalism’ means the regular gathering, preparing, collecting, photographing, recording, writing, editing, reporting, or publishing of news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public.

And again, that would exempt anyone with a blog. Start a blog now, and publish information to it "regularly" that covers "matters of public interest for dissemination to the public," and under the actual bill text I'm reading, you couldn't be compelled to testify about anything you published on that blog. I think that pretty much exempts everyone who wants to be exempt, and I think that's a bad idea.

Note that these definitions would definitely classify AppleInsider, Think Secret, and O’Grady’s PowerPage as “journalism,” as MDJ has consistently argued that they are, not “bloggers” as described by EFF in a transparent attempt to downplay their commercial aspects to gain sympathy. It does not resolve the issue about whether a company’s unreleased product plans that have no effect on public safety or finances (except whether you choose to buy the product or not) are in the “public interest.” That was the incredibly stupid decision by California’s Sixth Circuit Court of Appeal, which more or less set the standard that a company can't have confidential information if a Web site wants to gossip about it for commercial benefit. The trial court had that one right:

At the hearing the Court specifically asked what public interest was served by publishing private, proprietary product information that was ostensibly stolen and turned over to those with no business reason for getting it. Movants’ response was to again reiterate the self-evident interest of the public in Apple, rather than justifying why citizens have a right to know the private and secret information of a business entity, be it Apple, HP, a law firm, a newspaper, Coca-Cola, a restaurant, or anyone else. Unlike the whistleblower who discloses a health, safety, or welfare hazard affecting all, or the government employee who reveals mismanagement or worse by our public officials, the movants are doing nothing more than feeding the public’s insatiable desire for information.

That was right after:

The public has had, and continues to have a profound interest in gossip about Apple. Therefore it is not surprising that hundreds of thousands of “hits” on a website about Apple have and will happen. But an interested public is not the same as the public interest.

I fail to understand why that is not immediately obvious to everyone.

On Jim Inhofe and the stolen E-mails

Matt Deatherage — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 04:37:19 GMT

When Jim Inhofe is willing to have his Senate E-mail server hacked into, see 3000 of his and his staff's E-mail messages stolen, distributed to the entire world, and have his opponents tell everyone what the stolen messages mean rather than take his word for it˜when he's willing to do all that, then I'll listen to his rantings about the meaning of someone else's stolen property.

Until then, he can sit down and shut the hell up, or stand in front of the cameras and flatly admit that he thinks rules shouldn't apply to him.

That is all.

(Originally diaried at Daily Kos, where it was immediately troll rated because I'm a long-standing user and didn't perform ten minutes of searches to find the right open thread to bury it in, rather than post it in my own diary. Oh well.)

A modest proposal

Matt Deatherage — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:17:12 GMT

A suggestion for avoiding religious violence from the Internet:

Of course, most Christianists don't shoot up their fellow citizens. Fine. As soon as Christianists give us a foolproof way to identify their violent religious warriors from their moderates, we'll go back to allowing them to have guns. You tell us who the ones are that we have to worry about, prove you're right, and Christians can once again be armed. Until that day comes, we simply cannot afford the risk. You invent a McVeigh- or Roeder-detector that works every time it's used, and we'll welcome you back with open arms. This is not Christophobia, it is Christo-realism.

Of course, I changed a few words there. Read the original and notice who the speaker was.

The Democrats lost my district tonight.

Matt Deatherage — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 06:15:36 GMT

And I didn't even vote.

When the Oklahoma Legislature passed a blatantly unconstitutional bill forcing doctors to try to intimdate women into carrying all pregnancies to term, the governor rightfully vetoed it. The legislature then overrode that veto. 25 of 44 Democrats in the state House voted to override the veto. I said at the time:

And the state party wonders why voters don't get energized over legislative races.

My own district's representative, Ryan McMullen, is on that list. He regularly sends out newsletters to his constituents bragging about how he votes against the Democratic position on a vast majority of issues.

McMullen resigned earlier this year to take a mid-level USDA job, presumably so he can brag more about how he's not a Democrat.

A few weeks ago, there were primaries for two Democratic candidates and two Republican candidates. I had absolutely no idea who either Democrat was. Searching for their names on the Internet turned up almost nothing. I finally found campaign sites for both candidates. Both included lots of empty rhetoric about "western Oklahoma values."

Neither included the word "Democrat."

Given the legislative history of this caucus, with neither of them wanting to go on the record as actually supporting, you know, even one core Democratic position, I had no reason to vote for either of them. I never heard anything from one of them throughout the campaign.

The other one, I heard from. He robo-called my parents several times, even after they contacted the campaign and said "We don't live in that district anymore, please stop calling us." The calls didn't stop. His campaign left five identical, policy-free, empty rhetoric slick four-color flyers on my door, none of which contained the word "Democrat." I got five more in the mail. At home, despite having a sign on the door saying "DO NOT RING THE DOORBELL" because I have health problems and sleep at odd times, they rang the doorbell—just to leave the same flyer.

So I voted for the other guy in the primary. He lost, so I stayed home on Election Day.

Hear me well, candidates: the legislature does not need "Democrats' who do not support Democratic positions, or who are afraid to say they do. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's not going to get out and vote for Yet Another Ryan McMullen, Brad Carson, or Joe Lieberman.

If you want Democratic votes, run as a Democrat. Neither of the Democrats did in this race. The Republican won. I'm sure the actual voting record of the seat won't change very much at all. Better to have actual Republicans in seats than DINOs.

The Wizard of Oz 70th Anniversary Hi-Def Event

Matt Deatherage — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:34:37 GMT

That’s right: a movie you’ve seen dozens of times, almost surely all of them on television, is returning to theaters in a newly-mastered high-definition print for one night only. That’s tomorrow night, September 23, 2009, the 70^th anniversary of the film’s general release:

NCM Fathom, Warner Home Video and Turner Classic Movies present “The Wizard of Oz 70th Anniversary Hi-Def Event” featuring the first ever High Definition presentation of “The Wizard of Oz.” This One Night Event will take place on Wednesday, September 23rd at 7:00 p.m. (local time). In addition to the feature presentation of “The Wizard of Oz,” this exclusive event will include a special introduction by Robert Osborne, a classic film historian and host of Turner Classic Movies, followed by “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” a look into how L. Frank Baum’s classic novel was transformed into one of the most beloved films of all time including archival interviews, behind-the-scenes footage and rare musical outtakes. Whether seeing it for the first time or the 100th time, it is only fitting that audiences nationwide will have the chance to enjoy the 70th Anniversary of this multi-generational favorite in movie theatres for an exclusive One Night celebratory event.

Before our current home theater age, the only way to see a movie after its initial run was in re-release. The Wizard of Oz was re-released many times, only showing up on TV in the late 1960s, and even then only in special annual broadcasts (a tradition that has remained more or less intact even as the channel has changed from CBS to TBS or TCM). I think the last TV holdout was Gone With The Wind, another MGM-distributed film from 1939 (though not MGM-produced as Oz was), which did not grace TV screens at all until 1976.

The last time they did something like this was twenty years ago, for the film’s 50^th anniversary. That was the first time the film had been “restored” rather than just making new prints from the original color negative. In the original theatrical showings of 1939, the black-and-white framing sections had been hand-dyed with a sepia tone to give them the more “brown” look of a dusty Kansas—they were all rich shades of brown rather than just grays and blacks. The whole film was cleaned, of course, and the color sections were reprinted more vibrantly than they ever had been.

I got to go see it in downtown San Jose on one night of what I think was a three-night engagement back then. I remember that Andy Stadler and Chris Espinosa were both there, because they invited me to join them and several others for dinner afterwards, a kindness to a still-mostly-confused transplant that I’ve always remembered. And even in a small theater, seeing it on the big screen was wonderful. Nothing about this film had been designed for the smaller screens that hadn’t yet been invented. It was big and it was magical.

Now, admittedly, the version you have on DVD is at least equal to the one I saw on the big screen in 1989. That version became a VHS (and LaserDisc) release within a few months, and it and its documentary were the basis for the 1999 DVD release of the movie. A few years later, Warner Bros (now owners of the MGM library through Time Warner’s acquisition of Ted Turner’s empire) started doing digital remastering on these classic movies, including previously impossible tasks like precisely aligning the color plates. Similar to CMYK printing, early Technicolor® movies were shot with film in separate colors for red, blue, and green; all three films were printed together to make the final product. The alignment was done by hand, and the human eye simply isn’t that precise. When they applied this technique to Gone With The Wind, they were astonished to find that they could even see the detailed lacework on Scarlett’s party dress in the opening scenes. That and much more visual information had always been in the negatives, obscured by the blurring of slightly misaligned color film.

While the 1999 version says it’s a “digital remaster,” I don’t think it is—just the very clear analog restoration from 1989. The digital version was first seen in the 2005 special two-disc DVD release, no longer available, and limited to DVD resolution (720×480 pixels at 30fps). It makes sense that they’d control the downsampling of the digital version of the original 35mm negative at the lab, but it means that there’s a lot more visual information in the digital remastering than anyone outside Warner Bros has ever seen.

Tomorrow night’s your chance to see it on the big screen, where it belongs. I’m already calculating to see if I can pull it off (I have a Thursday morning appointment). This version comes to Blu-Ray and DVD next Tuesday, including (in these “ultimate collector’s editions”) the six-hour 1991 documentary MGM: When the Lion Roared, hosted by Patrick Stewart, that is absolutely indispensable for any film fan or Hollywood history buff. That only appeared on DVD itself in January, and it’s a wonderful addition to Oz in a new home video release. I’m now really really sad that I haven’t found a way to get a Blu-Ray player yet.

But even on a 62-inch LCD screen in gorgeous Blu-Ray, it can’t match the experience to be seen in theaters tomorrow night. If you can find any way to go see it, go. You can see showtimes and (if you’re lucky) buy tickets through Fandango. Most of the great epic movies lose quite a bit when seen on anything less than the biggest screen you can find. The Wizard of Oz is one of them, especially with digital realignment and remastering—what you’ll see is probably a clearer, more awe-inspiring picture than anyone who was not on the set has ever seen before.

Think about the differences in watching sports between standard definition and high-def. Now think of how high-def is still inferior to a good seat at the stadium. That’s the kind of difference we’re talking about here. It should be amazing. Go see it.

Your modern conservative movement in a nutshell

Matt Deatherage — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:27:07 GMT

Bring a gun to a rally featuring the President of the United States: to be encouraged.

Honk while passing a protest outside a GOP congressman's office: face a $1000 fine and three months in jail.

What Jane Hamsher Said

Matt Deatherage — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 21:39:21 GMT

So to all you liberal organizations in the “veal pen”—this is your moment of truth. I get all your emails. And the next Common Purpose meeting is probably on Tuesday. If you can’t get it together to at least put out a statement of support for Van Jones and condemn the White House for using him as a sacrificial lamb to right wing extremists that will devour us all if left unchecked, it’s time to add “proudly liberal only when it doesn’t matter” to your logo and be done with it.

Read the whole thing.

A note to Oklahoma Democratic candidates

Matt Deatherage — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 22:40:27 GMT

The latest from Senator I-Hate-All-Of-You:

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) had some harsh words for President Obama at a town hall back home in Oklahoma, the Tulsa World reports -- indeed, Inhofe says Obama is doing such a bad job, he’s not sure the country will last long enough for when the next Congress is sworn in, in January 2011.

“Every institution that has made this country the greatest nation in the world is under attack,” said Inhofe.

And regarding Guantanamo Bay, Inhofe said: “I don’t know why President Obama is obsessed with turning terrorists loose in America.”

And Inhofe worries for America’s future: “Those of you who think like I do, hope this country can hang on another 16 months.”

Be on notice that unless you, as a candidate, repudiate this insane hatred of America on the record, don’t count on my vote. Either you stand up for Americans in direct opposition to this man’s demented rantings, or you’re no better in office than someone who supports him.

Inhofe is the litmus test. If you can’t bring yourself to denounce him, run as a Republican.

Google Ad Placement FAIL

Matt Deatherage — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 06:01:41 GMT

From the Daily Kos RSS feed, just now:

Quote of the Day #15

Matt Deatherage — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 08:26:49 GMT

This is a long one. Amanda Marcotte read Stephen Amidon’s defense of the British National Health Service, and one passage stuck out for her, so she quotes it. I’m quoting her:

But I was particularly taken with this passage:

As my blindfolded daughter slept in the incubator’s eerie violet glow, I would take occasional strolls through the ward. It was the most egalitarian place I had ever seen. The yuppie woman honking into her newfangled cell phone, the young Pakistani mother who always seemed to be surrounded by a half-dozen gift-bearing relations, the self-sufficient older woman desperate to get home to look after her other children—all of them were cared for in exactly the same manner. Whoever needed help got it. When a terrified Afghani girl arrived, rumored to be only 14 and apparently abandoned by her family, several nurses dropped what they were doing to teach her the rudiments of child care. The rest of the mothers waited patiently until they were finished. Other wards were the same. There was no private wing with champagne service. Everybody was in this together. If you were a woman and you were in labor and you were in our part of London, this is where you came. If things went wrong, skilled doctors appeared with the latest technology. Nobody asked about insurance or co-pays.

This is exactly the nightmare of equality that is sending the conservatives into a tailspin that sends them to town halls to scream at their representatives. The lips trembling, the eyes flashing, the whole thing---the wingnuts of America are afraid of living what Amidon describes. They don’t want racial minorities and people without means sharing spaces with them, and especially not when they’re sick and being reminded that they’re the same flesh and blood as everyone else. The idea that a 14-year-old immigrant might get service first because she needs it more, and that there’s no way to pull rank? That’s the sort of thing that keeps the nutters up at night. When we say that the protesters are fundamentally racist, this is what we mean. They want health care access to be a privilege, a marker of class status. You or I might hear the story of an abandoned 14-year-old Afghani immigrant who gives birth and gets treated, probably for the first time in a long time, like a human being, and we support that. It seems obvious that the girl has suffered enough, and that she needs help, not continued mistreatment. But not everyone has that level of empathy. They’re focused solely on their own potential to lose some status if others have the right to be treated like human beings, and they just can’t get past that.

This may not be true for all opponents of health care, but I know it’s true for some. Usually the ones who scream the loudest about “Christian values.” Go figure.

The American Plan

Matt Deatherage — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 06:03:57 GMT

George Lakoff is a linguist, so there’s a lot of stuff in here that made my eyes glaze over, but here’s the important stuff:

Insurance company plans have failed to care for our people. They profit from denying care. Americans care about one another. An American plan is both the moral and practical alternative to provide care for our people.

The insurance companies are doing their worst, spreading lies in an attempt to maintain their profits and keep Americans from getting the care they so desperately need. You, our citizens, must be the heroes. Stand up, and speak up, for an American plan.

Language

As for language, the term “public option” is boring. Yes, it is public, and yes, it is an option, but it does not get to the moral and inspiring idea. Call it the American Plan, because that’s what it really is.

The American Plan. Health care is a patriotic issue. It is what your countrymen are engaged in because Americans care about each other. The right wing understands this well. It’s got conservative veterans at Town Hall meeting shouting things like, “I fought for this country in Vietnam, and I’m [sic] fight for it here.” Progressives should be stressing the patriotic nature of having our nation guaranteeing care for our people.

A Health Care Emergency. Americans are suffering and dying because of the failure of insurance company health care. 50 million have no insurance at all, and millions of those who do are denied necessary care or lose their insurance. We can’t wait any longer. It’s an emergency. We have to act now to end the suffering and death.

I’ll add here that it serves the opponents of an American Plan to say “47 million uninsured” rather than “50 million uninsured.” Politicians and journalists regularly round those numbers to a single significant figure, especially when it benefits right-wing narratives. Even progressives usually say “over 4000 U.S. casualties in Iraq so far” when the current confirmed count is 4331 with one pending as of the time I initially post this. It would be better to say “over 4300 casualties,” but we don’t. We should say “50 million uninsured,” not only because it matches other single-significant-figure estimates, but also because it is supportable. (The Census Bureau’s estimate of “nearly 46 million” was for 2007, but the MEPS data estimates 54 million people were without health insurance in the first half of 2007. 50 million splits the difference.)

Doctor-Patient care. This is what the public plan is really about. Call it that. You have said it, buried in PolicySpeak. Use the slogan. Repeat it. Have every spokesperson repeat it.

Coverage is not care. You think you’re insured. You very well may not be, because insurance companies make money by denying you care.

Deny you care… Use the words. That’s what all the paperwork and administrative costs of insurance companies are about—denying you care if they can.

Insurance company profit-based plans. The bottom line is the bottom line for insurance companies. Say it.

Private Taxation. Insurance companies have the power to tax and they tax the public mightily. When 20%–30% of payments do not go to health care, but to denying care and profiting from it, that constitutes a tax on the 96% of voters that have health care. But the tax does not go to benefit those who are taxed; it benefits managers and investors. And the people taxed have no representation [MD: in the body that’s taxing them]. Insurance company health care is a huge example of taxation without representation. And you can’t vote out the people who have taxed you. The American Plan offers an alternative to private taxation.

Is it time for progressive tea parties at insurance company offices?

Doctors care; insurance companies don’t. A public plan [MD: The American Plan?] aims to put care back into the hands of doctors.

Insurance company bureaucrats. Obama mentions them, but there is no consistent uproar about them. The term needs to come into common parlance.

Insurance companies ration care. Say it and ask the right questions: Have you ever had to wait more than a week for an authorization? Have you ever had an authorization turned down? Have you had to wait months to see a specialist? Does you primary care physician have to rush you through? Have your out-of-pocket costs gone up? Ask these questions. You know the answers. It’s because insurance companies have been rationing care. Say it.

Insurance companies are inefficient and wasteful. A large chunk of your health care dollar is not going for health care when you buy from insurance companies.

Insurance companies govern your lives. They have more power over you than even governments have. They make life and death decisions. And they are accountable only to profit, not to citizens.

The health care failure is an insurance company failure. Why keep a failing system? Augment it. Give an alternative.

If opponents want to bitch and moan about these terms, like proponents do about “death panels” and “government take-over,” they’re welcome to do so. The difference is that these words are factually true and the terms quoted in the previous sentence are deliberate and intentional lies. Not mistakes, not spin, not exaggeration for political effect. Lies. Untruths. Explicit and knowingly false statements designed to prevent voters from having the truth, coming from people who know that they could not possibly persuade voters to support their position if voters had the truth.

Speak honestly and directly using clear terms like these.

(Via George Lakoff on Daily Kos.)

Back to school with Amazon and BestBookBuys

Matt Deatherage — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 18:17:38 GMT

If someone you know, or love (or, ideally, both) is headed back to school in the next few weeks, keep Amazon in mind for everything from textbooks to school supplies. Buy your student a gift card from the banner below and help support the blog:

Amazon can save you some bucks on textbooks, but the best way to find all the discounts is to head over to the textbooks section of Best Book Buys. One of my college-age friends took that tip from me and, even after shipping and handling, is saving about $150 on his fall semester textbooks compared to his university's bookstore, and about $100 more than at Amazon alone.

You might not want to buy textbooks from a bunch of different sites, but a $50 savings just using Amazon is still pretty sweet, and using the above banner link helps support this blog, too. Save money either way! I love win-win scenarios.

Quote of the Day #14

Matt Deatherage — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 02:22:40 GMT

Brad at Sadly, No:

I think we could be the only country in the world where a significant minority of people hold angry protests demanding that the government not provide health care to people.

It’s more than weird. It’s sad.

Deep Thoughts #4

Matt Deatherage — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 07:02:56 GMT

Can someone please make sure that President Obama spends a few minutes watching that scene in The American President where the President decides to stop trying to pass a bill that won’t do any good and calls his opponents out, by name, and reminds them who is the president?

As soon as possible? kkthxbai.

Notes for journalists

Matt Deatherage — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 00:20:52 GMT

When Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck compare Democrats to Nazis, they know it is beyond the pale. They know that it is beyond the boundaries of political discourse. And they are absolutely counting on the fact that you know it's beyond the pale. They are relying on you to think, "No, that's out of bounds, that can't really be what they're saying. They must have meant something different." They are absolutely depending on you to try to excuse their behavior so they can keep pushing the most vile and obnoxious smears possible without facing the consequences.

Some of the people showing up at town hall meetings held by members of congress are not affiliated with right-wing or healthcare industry groups. Some of them are genuinely expressing opposition to "the health care bill," even though "the bill" does not exist yet, and most of what they're opposing isn't in any of the six or so bills currently being considered (or written).

Nonetheless, some of the people are there to disrupt the meetings. And some of the people who aren't being disruptive are still professional political operatives, not "ordinary folks" or "regular concerned citizens" as they claim to be. Finding people at these meetings who are neither disruptive nor political operatives does not mean that no people at the meeting are either disruptive, professional operatives, or both.

Whether professionally organized or otherwise, people who threaten health care proponents with gun violence are not "health care reform opponents." They are attempting to intimidate others out of participating in the democratic process or out of voting their conscience on critical issues of national importance by implying they'll get hurt or killed if they show up. That is not "opposition." That is terrorism by any definition of the word. Calling such people anything other than terrorists is objectively supporting terrorism.

At the same time, not all health care opponents are terrorists, just as not all people opposed to whatever they think is "reform" are political operatives or thugs attempting to shut down the process. It's equally wrong to describe all opponents of health care with just one of these labels.

If you are reporting on opposition to health care and you hear people saying that they don't like it because it will lead to government euthanasia or rationing or other charges that simply are not true, it is not your job to simply report what these people believe and describe it as a political problem for reform advocates. It is your job to find out if these beliefs are widely held and, if so, to report that they are not true. (This applies across the board: if you discover that health care reform advocates believe something false, it is your job to report this and explain that it is false.)

When you repeat false memes just because "the idea is out there" and say nothing more than "of course, we all know that's not true, but…" and spend the other two minutes of your report repeating what we "all know" not to be true, you are not committing journalism. You're strengthening a false perception. Again, by any definition, that's the exact opposite of "journalism."

Even worse, when national political figures say outrageously false things solely to install fear, it is your obligation to convey outrage in your reports proportional to the outrageousness of the lies. Sarah Palin and her cohort get national media time to say false things because you and your colleagues give it to her. Someone with Palin's casual relationship to objective reality and the truth should be treated no more seriously than Lyndon LaRouche. "Journalists" who treat obvious falsehoods as valid political remarks are teaching politicians to lie to the press.

Remember just a few weeks ago when every Republican in the world was demanding Nancy Pelosi's head because she had the nerve to suggest that the CIA lied to Congress—which turned out to be true? That she had to be purged from public life for "lying?" If you gave any ink or air time to those claims, and do not devote just as much air time to calls for Palin to be pulled off the national stage with an old-style vaudeville hook, you are objectively stating that Republicans may lie about Democrats with impunity but Democrats may not even suggest anything that Republicans dislike.

That is certainly your right under the First Amendment, but it is not journalism. It is Republican advocacy.

You can't assume people aren't lying. You can't assume that accusations of lying mean the accused is lying. You can't assume that someone meant to say something less horrible than what he said. You can't assume that people know what is true and what is not true.

Your job is to find out the truth and report it, especially when lots of people are heatedly expressing an opinion based on falsehoods. The story is not that people disagree. The story is that in an attempt to fix the most broken healthcare system in the developed world, we have people who want to completely overhaul it, people who don't want many changes at all, and people who are willing to use violence to prevent any changes in the broken system.

And even that's full of assumptions: is the system broken? Why does the United States pay twice as much per capita for health care as any other first-world country and yet gets only half as much coverage? How many health insurance jobs would be lost with universal coverage, and would the growth in the economy from people not stuck in bad jobs or bad places make up for it? Do Americans really believe it's more important to protect insurance companies from losses or layoffs than to break the chains between crappy jobs and available health care?

I know the biggest media outlets love "these guys said blah, but these other guys said not blah" stories—they're incredibly easy and no one yells at the reporters since they just "reported" what everyone said, like a good stenographer would. That's not journalism. The stories are out there.

Go find them.

Countering the tea baggers

Matt Deatherage — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:09:01 GMT

As Digby notes today, one of the easiest ways to know where the tea baggers intend to show up in force is to simply look at their list of meetings to attend.

Since their entire goal is to completely disrupt such town hall meetings to make sure that the 70% of Americanns in favor of health care reform are not heard, one thing you can do is read their memo, show up to the same events early, and do your best to make sure their disruptive tactics fail.

On the list of events, we see that the only congressman for western Oklahoma (Frank Lucas, R-OK3) plans to hold meetings tomorrow, August 6, in Hollis, Anadarko, Hinton, Altus, Cordell, Hobart, and Mangum.

It's a bit odd, because the Congressman is supposed to be in separate locations in Hollis and Anadarko at the same time, and in Altus and Cordell separately at the same time later in the day, and his time in Hobart overlaps with the time he's supposed to be in Mangum. So there's a decent chance Lucas won't be at all these places even though the teabaggers say he will, but he's probably going to be at some of them.

Quote of the Day #13

Matt Deatherage — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 22:25:06 GMT

Jesse Taylor, founder and prodigal son at Pandagon (I emphasized the QOTD but presented the full context so it made more sense):

I’ve done some court watching this summer, and the one thing I’ve noticed above all else is the degree to which black people get pulled over…and pulled over…and pulled over. I think the main reason NASCAR isn’t that popular among black people is that we’re not used to seeing anyone drive that long without being stopped and asked what we’re doing in the area. Now, even if black people and white people commit crimes at similar rates, there are a lot more opportunities for black people to be caught, because we’re on the side of the road having plain sight searches done on us at a far greater rate (something which, of course, is justified by the far higher rates of black convictions which are in no way connected to this phenomenon because hey look New Jack City?)

KFOR: Still double-selling its air time [u]

Matt Deatherage — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 03:55:45 GMT

Again tonight, KFOR ran local commercials on top of time the station had sold to NBC for The Tonight Show, just as it did yesterday. Here's the July 29 list of advertisers whose businesses I will not patronize because they're enabling this scam at KFOR:

Fowler Toyota
Subway (new chicken salad sandwich)
Ferguson Pontiac/Buick/GMC
Wyatt, Austin, Kingery, and Hale, attorneys at law
Oklahoma GMC dealers

The Tonight Show starts at 10:34:30 PM. KFOR finally started showing it around 10:37 PM. No one involved in this should get your business.

Update: KFOR didn’t cut off even one frame of the opening to The Tonight Show on either Thursday or Friday, possibly related to me bringing up the topic at HDTVOK.com. Interestingly enough, Conan mocked Oklahoma City in a monologue sketch Thursday night. I can’t imagine that it was retaliation. Well, I can imagine it, but I can’t imagine that it’s true.

Two stories from the Oklahoman

Matt Deatherage — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 07:59:26 GMT

Same day, same RSS feed, presented together without irony. Story #1:

WASHINGTON — Rep. Dan Boren said Tuesday that it was "actually a positive” that the Republican National Committee is running a radio ad in his congressional district about health care reform.

Boren, D-Muskogee, the only Democrat in the state’s seven-person delegation, said the ad urges people to call him and that he encourages the same thing.

Opposes current form

Callers will learn, he said, that he has "many problems with the (House) legislation” and would oppose it in its current form

"I’ve taken the position of slowing this down, letting our constituents read the bill and learn about it.

And story #2:

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Oklahoma ranks 44th nationally in a new state-by-state study on the well-being of America’s children.

The 2009 Kids Count study found that since 2000, Oklahoma improved on three of 10 measures affecting child well-being.

It seems odd that the Boren story’s RSS summary is so much longer than the other—but then again, if you read more of the second story, you might want, oh, I don’t know, health care reform?

The 2009 Kids Count study found that since 2000, Oklahoma improved on three of 10 measures affecting child well-being. But conditions worsened for Oklahoma’s kids on six others.

Oklahoma’s death rate for children aged 1 to 14 increased 16 percent between 2000 and 2006, from 25 deaths per 100,000 to 29 deaths per 100,000.

The state’s death rate for teens aged 15 to 19 also rose, from 77 deaths per 100,000 in 2000 to 85 deaths per 100,000 in 2006.

In addition, the percentage of poor children in Oklahoma increased from 19 percent in 2000 to 22 percent in 2007. The state ranks 41st nationally on that measure.

So by all means, Rep. Boren (and your GOP friends), let’s slow down the idea of improving any of this. If they die before they’re eligible to vote, that’s just one less thing for you to worry about.

KFOR: One step forward. And only one.

Matt Deatherage — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 04:11:05 GMT

After years of having the worst digital picture in Oklahoma City, due both to outdated equipment and active indifference on the part of its owners, KFOR shocked everyone a few weeks ago by becoming the first commercial OKC TV station to broadcast its news in high-definition. It's impressive, and it is beautiful. It's a huge improvement, mostly because their SD picture (used for all news before the switch) gives a blurry, washed-out, unsaturated picture. KFOR's HD picture is better than the SD pictures of the other network affiliates in town.

KFOR's SD picture remains noticeably worse than every other station's, reported to be because the station owners have refused to update the broadcast equipment since 1996 or so. (It runs OS/2. I'm not kidding.)

Unfortunately, that kind of "do it on the cheap, no one will care" mentality continues to dominate KFOR's management. KFOR has not updated the rest of its way-too-old equipment, so the station (like all others in OKC other than OETA) still can't record and play back HD programming. All syndicated programming is not just in SD, but in the crappiest SD you can imagine. The 10PM newscast is beautiful in HD, but the 3AM rerun is in crappy SD because they can't even record their own live broadcasts in HD and retransmit them. Word over at HDTVOK is that KFOR doesn't play to update this equipment to HD for a few more years.

Another part of the "cheap" mentality is refusing to sacrifice local ads even when it drives viewers crazy. I wrote this over two years ago about KFOR's severe weather coverage compared to its competition:

A day earlier, KOCO had done it right, though - they left their prime-time HDTV signal active, updating people on storms during the commercial breaks, going so far as to emphasize "You're not missing any of your programming."

During the same storm period, KFOR-DT dropped shows like Heroes out of HDTV to show a weather map on the screen, and broke into programming to talk about storms outside the broadcast area. When the commercials came up, KFOR removed the weather map and let the commercials air uninterrupted. KOCO (and even Sinclair's KOKH-DT) did it the other way around - weather map on analog channels, HDTV undisturbed, updates during commercials. They bypassed some ad revenue to serve their viewers who weren't affected and update those who were. KFOR interrupted everyone's programs, so its viewers didn't see their programs and still saw all the commercials. KFOR sacrificed nothing.

And, really, that's my major beef: for KFOR, it's all about the appearance of looking concerned about severe weather without actually being concerned. They didn't give up a single ad dollar, but they interrupted high-rated programs to put the weather guy on to look concerned about storms affecting people who couldn't possibly receive his broadcasts.

Now, I know from feedback I've received and from complaints I've read elsewhere that I'm nowhere near the only person who notices this or who gets annoyed by it. With KOCO and KWTV all doing the right thing, KFOR has definitely felt the pressure. So, starting this year, they break into HD programs at the commercial breaks for severe weather updates if the storm is not life-threatening. Thunderstorms moved through OKC tonight, and KFOR responded by in-commercial weather updates. Hooray!

Except…no, no cheers. KFOR refuses to give up the ad revenue for its local commercials, even as it has adapted to giving up the revenue of the NBC ads. So, on nights when they break into primetime programming for weather updates, what do they do?

They run 2-3 extra minutes of ads after the local news, pre-empting the first 2-3 minutes of The Tonight Show.

They did it tonight, finally starting the show in Conan's second? maybe third? joke. (They can't tape-delay it by 2-3 minutes because they can't record and rebroadcast HD programming. If they try that, the resulting washed-out broadcast is so ugly I can't bear to watch it.)

What's worse is that 30 seconds of the ads running instead of The Tonight Show were KFOR's own promos, for the station's own programs or promotions. We didn't get to see monologue jokes because KFOR wanted to let people watching at 10:35 PM know they needed to log onto the station's Web site at 9AM sharp tomorrow morning to buy "half-price" gift certificates to a local restaurant. It was a ten-second promo stretched into 30 seconds very inelegantly, playing instead of actual programming.

So, to be clear, here are the Ads that KFOR ran instead of showing NBC programming in an attempt to short-change viewers late at night because competition won't let them do it during prime-time anymore:

"I need This.com" local online business directory
Oklahoma Toyota dealers
"Half Off Deals" for $50 gift certificates at "The Old Mill" restaurant at KFOR's Web site
Academy Sports & Outdoors (a 15-second spot, cut off in the last second apparently in an attempt to finally air The Tonight Show)

If you run one of those four businesses, please contact KFOR for a refund of your ad price because they aired your spot over scheduled programming. You paid to make sure that I won't be purchasing your goods or services, and that's really not what your ad budget should go for.

And KFOR? Stop it. If you're unwilling to give up your local ads even for severe weather coverage, stop pretending otherwise and trying to sneak them over actual programming like people won't notice. We notice. We're keeping track. We won't patronize businesses whose ads you air instead of actual programming. Your giant-ass weather map already completely covers up Conan's face (or Jimmy Fallon's) during their interviews, your SD picture is embarrassing, and doing news in HD doesn't give you "the benefit of the doubt" to air stupid commercials over network programming.

(It should go without saying that during all this, the 4-2 "24-hour weather channel" continued completely unchanged with no severe weather coverage of any kind—not even the weather map you had imposed over Conan's face. At 11:08 PM on Tuesday night, while 4-1 is warning of severe thunderstorms, 4-2 is showing Mike Morgan in a segment taped in late afternoon saying there "might" be severe weather tonight. Then live radar with techno music. Then back to a seven-hour-old weather segment. It's a joke and a waste of broadcast transmission. Either use the damn channel for actual weather coverage or turn it off.)

Trust me, KFOR: if you actually cared about the viewers, it would be evident. You don't, and that's evident too.

Inhofe's getting cocky

Matt Deatherage — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 06:00:36 GMT

He knows the local media will never, ever, ever call him out on his allergy to the truth.

Inhofe on the birthers: "They have a point"

Matt Deatherage — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 20:31:03 GMT

Nutsos!

Speaking of the Birthers, a remarkable line from POLITICO’s piece today on how Republican members of Congress are looking with trepidation to Birther encounters on the recess:

Sen. Jim Inhofe has also tried to find the elusive middle ground.

“They have a point,” he said of the birthers. “I don’t discourage it. ... But I’m going to pursue defeating [Obama] on things that I think are very destructive to America.”

Amazing. These guys are a hoot!

And, again, don't expect any Oklahoma media to report on any of this at all—or, if they do, to treat the birther narrative as potentially valid. Josh Marshall posted last night on why, even if you assume the birther narrative is true, it still wouldn't matter.

None of this is going to change unless a powerful, vigilant media watchdog moves into the state and starts calling the press on their obsequiousness to Republicans and hostility to Democrats. Media Matters opened a dedicated Colorado office in 2004:

Using our website colorado.mediamatters.org to disseminate research and information, Colorado Media Matters posts rapid-response items as well as longer-term research and analytic reports documenting conservative misinformation throughout the media. Additionally, Colorado Media Matters works daily to notify activists, journalists, pundits, and the general public about instances of misinformation, providing them with the resources to rebut false claims and the tools to take direct action against offending media institutions.

Go look at the Daily Kos Electoral Map for Colorado in the last few elections and notice how a state that was about 5% red has now switched to about 5% blue. In 2002, Colorado had two blue House districts and five red ones. In 2004, it was three blue ones. In 2006, it tilted to four blue districts and three red, and in 2008, it's up to five blue districts and two red—a complete reversal.

Of course there was lots else going on in the country at the time, but countering misinformation and calling bullshit for what it is makes a huge difference. You can be sure that if Media Matters did open an Oklahoma office, every TV station and the two largest newspapers would continually try to discredit them as a partisan outlet. But the funny thing is that since MMFA only publishes the actual words and recordings of conservative misinformation, people who are curious about it can check the site and read it for themselves. When you read or hear a bad sentence surrounded by two paragraphs or two minutes of equally bad context, it becomes clear that the person speaking meant exactly what he or she said.

That, more than anything else, has been a conservative movement killer—exposing what they're actually saying and doing. That's what Oklahoma needs. We had nothing even remotely like it last year, and because of it, Inhofe's fear-mongering ads got him a big victory over a worthy challenger who would have done much better for this state on every single level. When no one with a megaphone speaks the truth, the lies carry the day.

And while we're talking about lying politicians...

Matt Deatherage — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:36:48 GMT

Here's Sally Kern bragging about how she used Oklahoma tax dollars to promote her religion to other people, through her "proclamation" (full of other lies).

You remember it—this one:

NOW THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that we the undersigned elected officials of the people of Oklahoma, religious leaders and citizens of the State of Oklahoma, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world, solemnly declare that the HOPE of the great State of Oklahoma and of these United States, rests upon the Principles of Religion and Morality as put forth in the HOLY BIBLE; and

BE IT RESOLVED that we, the undersigned, believers in the One True God and His only Son, call upon all to join with us in recognizing that “Blessed is the Nation whose God is the Lord,” and humbly implore all who love Truth and Virtue to live above reproach in the sight of God and man with a firm reliance on the leadership and protection of Almighty God; and

BE IT RESOLVED that we, the undersigned, humbly call upon Holy God, our Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer, to have mercy on this nation, to stay His hand of judgment, and grant a national awakening of righteousness and Christian renewal as we repent of our great sin.

Who determines what the Bible says about these "principles of religion and morality?" Who decides what is "above reproach in the sight of God and man?" Who decides what is the "great sin," given that Sally's list of facts preceding this is full of such bald deception that it can only be characterized as "you're going to burn in hell"-class lying?

Why, Sally Kern and her pastor husband and their church decide, of course! They speak for God and interpret the Bible, and they demand that their version be codified into law so that people who don't believe as they do can be properly punished, including imprisonment.

None of this is new. We discussed it all last year when, addressing those who'd prefer to dismiss this anti-American lunacy, I explained Why Sally Kern matters.

I honestly love this state and the people in it. I really do. I just don't understand why we keep electing officials who obviously can't stand Oklahomans, or even Americans.

As usual, Jim Inhofe is lying through his teeth

Matt Deatherage — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:18:55 GMT

And, as usual, he's lying to advance policies that lead to more illness and death for Oklahomans and all Americans.

Don't expect KFOR, KOCO, KWTV, OETA, or The Oklahoman to bother mentioning any of this to their viewers or readers. If they tell the truth about Inhofe or Coburn, Sally Kern's fans call and yell at them. Avoiding criticism is much more important than the truth.

(Not to Jim Inhofe, of course. To him, nothing is more important than installing policies that hurt Americans. Not his money, not the truth, not God, nothing. It's obviously his only driving purpose in life.)

Obama, McCain give dueling holiday addresses

Matt Deatherage — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 21:57:46 GMT

That’s a real, I Am Not Making This Up headline by Will Lester of Associated Press:

WASHINGTON – In dueling holiday addresses, President Barack Obama appealed for public support of his domestic programs and Sen. John McCain said Americans should side with Iranian election protesters.

The 2008 rivals for the White House both cited the spirit of the nation’s founders in their Fourth of July radio and Internet broadcasts on Saturday.

Some points that seem to escape Lester:

The election was eight months ago, and Obama won. He is the President of the United States.

Therefore, Obama is no longer “dueling” with John McCain. No one is currently challenging Obama for his office.

There is no “shadow president” in the United States leading an opposition cabinet, so McCain is not Obama’s counterpart on “the other side” of the story. McCain is just one of 100 senators, many of whom will make speeches today, some even online or on the radio. None of them are the equal of the president.

Since Obama is not facing another candidate at the moment, there is no need to invent the “other side” purely for the sake of looking like you’re trying to be fair and balanced. I do not recall AP going out of its way during Bush speeches to publicize anything that John Kerry said.

This is what “working the refs” gets you—Lester and AP are so scared that Republicans will yell at them for reporting on the President’s address that they decided, out of thin air, to treat a speech by his defeated rival as if it were of the same stature.

What liberal media?

(In happier news, see here for Independence Day material.)

Another reason Republicans keep getting re-elected in Oklahoma

Matt Deatherage — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 21:31:04 GMT

From The Oklahoman:

WASHINGTON — Vice President Joe Biden’s office tried to enlist Rep. Dan Boren in a public relations fight against Sen. Tom Coburn after Coburn released a report criticizing some projects funded by the $787 billion economic stimulus package.

Boren, D-Muskogee, said last week he rejected the request because of an “unspoken rule” among the Oklahoma congressional delegation that members refrain from criticizing each other.

“We just don’t do that,” Boren said. “It’s just not my style to critique fellow members of the delegation. We’re too small a state to get into those kinds of internal battles.”

We’ve already discussed Dan Boren’s keen political mind when he chose not to endorse his party's nominee for the Presidency last year, his priorities that put low cigarette taxes ahead of health care for poor children, and his belief that it’s fine to torture American citizens without letting them have access to courts to challenge their detention. Earlier this year, he said that the stimulus bill was “not an American bill” because it didn’t include Republican ideas. Because when the GOP controlled Congress, they always included Democratic ideas in their controversial bills?

Boren infamously wrote how proud he was to be a Democrat while not telling his readers that he voted against the “undemocratic” Bush bills he had later decided to criticize. But I guess that’s part for the course when you’re the only Democratic representative from a state and choose to vote with the GOP 41% of the time.

At that time, I said:

Markos would say we need Democrats like Boren because he’ll vote for Speaker Pelosi, and that’s true - but while we’re in opposition, he’s pretty damn useless.

Now we’re not in the opposition, and Boren is still pretty damn useless. He’s one of the 44 Democrats who voted against the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which wasn’t even worth noting because it was absolutely unsurprising.

If Boren could get elected in his district with an (R) after his name on the ballot, he’d do it in a heartbeat. But he decided to run in the only majority-D district in the state, with a famous name, so the (D) was a requirement. It’s such a shame political realities force him into an identification that clearly does not match his heart or actions.

If memory serves me correctly...

Matt Deatherage — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:56:04 GMT

…when prominent Democratic politician John Edwards from North Carolina admitted that he had an affair, it was the lead story on the KFOR news (Oklahoma City channel 4, NBC affiliate) at 4:30 PM, or at least covered in the top section. At the time, Edwards neither held political office nor was a candidate for political office.

I mention this because today, prominent Republican politician Mark Sanford of South Carolina admitted that he has been having an affair with a woman from (and in) Argentina, capping a six-day period where he was “missing” and out of contact with his staff. That’s important because he is currently the governor of South Carolina, where he had made a name for himself in conservative circles by fighting to keep his state from receiving federal stimulus money because it might go to poor people who didn’t vote for him. He’s also, until today, been mentioned as a serious presidential candidate in 2012.

I also mention this because on today’s 4:30 PM news, KFOR didn’t see fit to mention the story at all, with the exception of asking people to call in and opine about it for “The Rant,” a segment they air each night with random local opinions because they’re lazy and it’s cheaper than accurately measuring local opinion (with a poll) or going out and finding actual news.

So…Democrat who’s not in office admitting to an affair? Top story. Prominent Republican governor having an international affair while touted as presidential candidate after being missing for nearly a week? No big whoop.

This is how people like Inhofe and Coburn get elected here.

(They are going to cover it at 5:00, and my memory may be faulty, but bad news about Republicans gets nowhere near the same attention from the Oklahoma media as bad news about Democrats does.)

Hey, my GOP Congressman actually did something almost newsworthy!

Matt Deatherage — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 05:59:48 GMT

…and all too typical for today’s GOP. Normally, Frank Lucas doesn’t show up in the news, but here he is:

Leaders of a new GOP group, the “Rural American Solutions Group,” are distributing a document attacking climate change legislation as an economic burden to most of the country. As it turns out, the information in the press release was provided to the Republican congressmen by Peabody Energy, a juggernaut of the coal industry. Staffers for GOP Reps. Frank Lucas (R-OK), Sam Graves (R-MO), and Doc Hastings (R-WA) are emailing around a map that purports to detail “how the Democrats’ National Energy Tax unfairly targets rural Americans.”

A closer look at the source of the image reveals the document’s origins:

Two employees of Peabody Energy are listed in the metadata of the map document: Chairman and CEO Greg Boyce and Communications Manager Chris Taylor. The congressmen opposing climate change legislation — Reps. Lucas, Graves, and Hastings — are simply copying-and-pasting information that has been directly fed to them by Peabody Energy.

It’s somewhat charming to realize these guys still think they can let the industries they’re supposed to be regulating literally write the laws and press releases and think no one will notice it. They’ll have to do a small amout of actual work to avoid that, and that’s certainly not what we’ve come to expect from our modern GOP.

The Stoopid, It Burns

Matt Deatherage — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 23:52:38 GMT

You have to love the conservative mass-forwarded E-mails because they just never ever stop. You can Google any series of several consecutive words in any one of them and you’ll get hundreds and hundreds of hits from where they just took the same text and pasted it, over and over, every place they could find.

I think this ties in with the fact that most big-money conservative blogs have no comment sections and why conservatives have no real “grass roots” movements. The tea parties, of course, were all astroturf: funded and organized by really big conservative organizations (that were, in turn, funded by people who think that the top marginal tax rate of the Clinton administration, a time of massive economic growth, was unconscionably high) pretending to be “grass roots.”

What passes for modern conservatism is very much a top-down movement. The message comes from the top and everyone repeats it until it’s accepted as true. Discussion is not conducive to this model and is therefore discouraged.

E-mail forwarding sends the message to hundreds of people whom you believe to be like-minded, usually your extended family and friends. Those who don’t agree are socially pressured to be quiet and not speak up for fear of offending the family, causing tension at family get-togethers, pissing off the wealthy aunt who controls everyone’s inheritance, and so on.

It looks like a discussion forum, but progressive dissent gets suppressed. Look at how difficult it was for this Daily Kos diarist to finally respond to a forwarded conservative talking-point E-mail after dozens and dozens of them had simply pushed her to her breaking point. The sender there didn’t want to give up, but in another recent case, the sender apologized—not realizing it was angry conservative propaganda, she’d just passed it along as “interesting.”

Of course, some E-mail forwards are hardly political at all (awwww), but many of them are conservative agitprop pretending to be humor or news or whatever. That’s the case with the one obliquely referenced above, that a friend of mine got through two family members in forwarded E-mail today:

Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that during the mad cow epidemic our government could track a single cow, born in Canada almost three years ago, right to the stall where she slept in the state of Washington? And, they tracked her calves to their stalls. But they are unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country. Maybe we should give each of them a cow…

A moment or two on Google showed me was already being forwarded in early 2004. But worse than that, it just doesn’t make any sense outside of a late-night monologue.

First, “our government” could track sick Canadian cattle because Canada has a strong mandatory animal identification system for just such a purpose. When the first BSE case hit Canada in 2003, the US had no such system. Six years later, the US has no such system, largely because the cattle and animal feed industries spent millions of dollars lobbying the Bush Administration to prevent it from happening. We have only a voluntary system in which most industrial suppliers do not participate.

It’s very similar to the problem of salmonella in chicken and eggs. We know how to cure this, and it only raises the cost of chicken by less than two cents per pound, but industry is against the idea of washing the shit out of the chicken coop more than once every two years, so we get salmonella in the poultry instead. So here, oddly, the conservative E-mail is praising an animal identification program that conservatives in the US strongly oppose.

Second, is the author of this E-mail suggesting that we would be able to track cows in the USA if they had freedom of movement? Or if they smuggled themselves into the country undetected in search of a better life? “Give them a cow” bypasses the horribly racist idea that Mexicans be fitted with mandatory ear tags with GPS receivers, but the idea that immigrants all want a cow isn’t that much better.

(Let’s be honest: the “illegal alien” debate isn’t about illegal white immigrants. It’s about the brown-skinned folks who speak Spanish. Some of those “Minutemen” have some serious racial issues.)

So, shorter wingnut joke: “If we had a mandatory animal tracking system that I oppose, we could give all those Mexicans a cow, because they’re all dirt poor farmhands, and then we could track them like the animals they are since the stupid courts won’t let us implant ID chips in them.”

Ha ha. Hilarious! I can see why conservatives have forwarded this joke to each other for more than half a decade, and why they support groups who post articles titled “Subhuman Mexicans (God’s Children?) Prey on Countrymen.” It’s hard to see why they don’t post these things in places where people might disagree with bulletproof logic like this!

Dear Food Network: Grilling (with Alton Brown)

Matt Deatherage — Sun, 31 May 2009 05:55:10 GMT

Not a bad little show, despite disappointment in some quarters.

At least, until you get to the very end, where you see this message:

© MMVIX
Television Food Network, G.P.
All rights reserved

Apparently including the right to redefine Roman numerals.

So, where have I been?

Matt Deatherage — Tue, 26 May 2009 02:58:26 GMT

Depressed.

I suppose I should have anticipated this, like the Democrats capitulating or the Spanish Inquisition, but it just kind of came out of nowhere about a month ago, and it hit pretty hard.

The infamous "they" say that people who've gone through major illness can experience depression, even if they come through it relatively OK, as I did (not counting the meds and the low-sodium diet and the whole "your heart doesn't like you" thing). And I'd gone through some small bouts of this in the past few years, but nothing like this—and especially not when everything had been going so well right up to the moment I just couldn't get anything done.

You have to understand that my parents are…different. Because their DNA has actually unwound and formed the letters "STUBBORN" at the molecular level, I am, as of this writing, unable to imagine myself not wanting to get out of bed in the morning. I know that depression does this to others, even to people I love, and I fully understand this, but I can't imagine it for me. My back hurts when I lie down too much; I don't like being in the dark unless I'm sleeping, etc., etc., etc.

No, when I'm depressed, I get out of bed. I get to the office, I cook, I eat, I keep the kitchen clean. I run errands when necessary (but not otherwise). I even shower every now and then. But I don't get anything productive done. If you interacted with me, you probably wouldn't know anything was different at all, but either I sit at work for hours without typing a word, or I'm resting in the nearby recliner because my back hurts, in absolutely no hurry to get back to work.

My version of "stay in bed all day" is "don't read E-mail or news." I skipped both on several days in the past month.

Historically, I can't wait to explain things once I've figured them out. For the past month, I've figured things out and thought, "Oh, that's nice." And then I see what's on TV. (Normally, I only watch a few TV shows and otherwise keep it on programs I've seen dozens of times so it's just office-level background. For the past month, I've been scouring the guide looking for things to watch. A few are winners, but not many.)

It's been going on for some time, but it's been a background-level thing that's only been an impediment, not a disability. For the past month, it's been the other way around. Here's a simple example: when I get this way, I'll sometimes wear the same shirt and pants for a few days in a row, mostly because I don't do anything to get them dirty or smelly. So I go through clothes very slowly.

Now that I'm snapping out of it, I have at least ten loads of laundry to do. Think about how many shirts are in one washer load, and then think about each of them representing 2-4 days worth of use, and…yeah, I haven't done laundry in a long time.

It should go without saying that working less is possibly the single least useful course of action (or inaction) I could have taken, but I guess that's what makes it "depression." It seems to be lifting, as evidenced by previous mention of loads and loads of laundry being done (some of these things haven't been clean since the last time we were in Daylight Savings Time), and I can even see some writing going on later in the week. I think. I don't really know what triggered this last bout, the worst I can remember (still not "painful," just extremely, extremely unhelpful), and therefore I don't know if another one might be coming.

I hope to get on a roll and, once again, have no time to be depressed. It works that way, right?

Preview of tomorrow's controversy (updated)

Matt Deatherage — Thu, 21 May 2009 03:48:20 GMT

Now that American Idol has aired on the West Coast, I removed the “spoiler” tag in the subject, but you are hereby duly warned that this post reveals the winner. There’s more new stuff at the end, too.

Michael Slezak of Entertainment Weekly bet that Adam Lambert would win American Idol. Now that he’s lost his bet, he’s going to have to dye his hair red. Here’s what one commenter to the EW liveblog had to say about it:

Jill G Wed, May 20, 2009 at 10:33 PM EST
Enjoy your red hair Slezak. You and your cronies at EW made this travesty happen as much as Simon and the rest of the media. Well, you people want to know “what difference does it make if he’s gay?” Well, this is the difference that it makes.

This woman, and perhaps others like her, are boasting that they were able to defeat the most talented person in a talent competition solely because he might be gay. “This is the difference that it makes.”

I’m pretty sure this is one of those arguments they don’t want to make in public, but flush with triumph, some of the true bigotry is coming through.

This is not about people who preferred Kris Allen to Adam Lambert or vice-versa; this is about people who either use this kind of blunt language, or use coded language (“Kris Allen is a good Christian family man,” implying that all of those adjectives are equally good and none of them apply to Lambert), to “explain” why Allen won the competition. It only needs “explaining” if you believe that Allen was not the more talented performer of the two finalists, and if you believe that, you’re admitting that he shouldn’t have won.

In a smaller way, this could become like the revelations of who donated to Proposition 8 in California: if you say things like this, you can’t then come back and say you have “no problem with gay people.” If you’re arguing, much less boasting, that people who think like you got the more talented competitor defeated because he might be gay, then you are, by definition, a bigot.

If you just like Kris Allen better, that’s up to you. I didn’t watch the final competition and didn’t vote for either party. I’m just giving you the preview of the culture warriors prematurely bragging that they defeated the “gay” guy, until they realize how that looks, to be immediately followed by their instant backtracking and insistence that they didn’t say what everyone has record of them saying.

Update: At Gawker, they caught evidence that the right-wing was planning to play victim if Lambert won, too:

UPDATE: Someone sent in this Daily Beast post that earlier today, as evidenced in the URL of the post, was titled “Why Adam Lambert Will Win Tonight.” Shortly after the broadcast, the title was changed to “Why Adam Lambert’s Loss Is a Red State Victory.” [Daily Beast]

So some elements on the right-wing were planning on making Lambert into a wedge issue either way—they just expected him to win. The unexpected victory of Kris Allen just provided a short window where the true ugly feelings came out in unguarded celebration.

Quote of the Day #12

Matt Deatherage — Tue, 19 May 2009 07:55:22 GMT

Amanda Marcotte went to Paris and wrote up some of her experiences. Commenter Keith made my day:

You always hear idiot Americans, especially of the right wing variety, wank about how cowardly the French are…

The irony being that the French government was cowardly, not the French people. The French people formed the resistance (headed by a bunch of wussy artists and writers, no less) and kicked Nazi ass, while saving not just their homeland, but their culture as well. The French did what every Right Wing jackass dreams of doing in their Galt/Wolverines! macho fantasy, and they did it without bragging or complaining about how hard it was. Which is the long way of saying, when the revolution comes, I’d rather have JP Sarte and a bottle of red wine on my side over any gun nut with a stockpile of warmed over cold war fantasies.

Amen.

"Heart Attack Entrées with Side Orders of Stroke"

Matt Deatherage — Mon, 11 May 2009 22:43:44 GMT

Overly Salty Restaurant Meals Present Long-Term Health Risks for All, and Immediate Danger for Some

WASHINGTON—Unsafe levels of sodium chloride, or salt, in chain restaurant meals increase one’s chance of developing hypertension, heart attacks, strokes, and kidney disease according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The nonprofit food safety and nutrition watchdog group today is exposing chain restaurant meals with dangerously high levels of sodium and is renewing its call on industry and government to lower sodium levels in foods.

I love CSPI and have been a member for more than 20 years, and this calls out stuff from both Chili’s and Red Lobster, but I wish they’d moderated it slightly: Red Lobster’s food is included because the company just published real nutritional information for the first time ever. Less than a month later, they’re being nationally blasted for having too much salt and calories in the food.

And, in fairness, it is too much salt and too many calories, but the standard restaurant industry practice has been “don’t publish the nutritional info because shit like this will happen.” Without that info, I can’t eat at those chains at all due to my low sodium dietary requirements. The Red Lobster nutritional information shows that there are plenty of fresh fish dishes I can have with perfectly normal sodium levels. Until they published this, I didn’t know that. I had to assume that everything on the menu was 2500mg or more of sodium, and as it turns out, some things are much higher. (North Pacific King Crab Legs: 300 calories, no saturated fat, 3570mg of sodium. What do they do, boil it in liquid salt?)

And yeah, way too much of the food at Chili’s is too high in sodium, too. But I eat there regularly, because I can get the Guiltless Grill Salmon for 420mg of sodium, or with the honey-mustard glaze for a total of 605mg of sodium. I can’t have the Crispy Chicken Crisper Tacos (order of 3, 2020 calories, 104g fat, 25g saturated fat, and 6050mg sodium), but then again, few people should.

Bonus hint for low-sodium folks: there is way more salt in most flour tortillas than you’d think, about 323mg in each of Chili’s, and up to 400mg each in supermarket or other restaurant ones. Avoid dishes that use flour tortillas, or ask for corn tortillas instead (usually 10mg or so of sodium each) and save yourself a bunch of trouble.