First Draft

Nobody Knows What To Do

That's primarily what I took away from Chicago Media Future this afternoon, that and a dislike of Patrick Spain of Newser.com, who spent his entire time on the afternoon panel making the following assertions:

1. Nobody with fewer than 5 million hits daily is making any money online.

2. Politico has replaced the Washington Post as a source of good political information.

3. HuffPo will replace the New York Times.

4. The New York Times will not exist one year from today.

There's not enough bish please in the whole world for #1, like, tell it to Dooce and the Fug Girls and Nate Silver. If #2 is true I weep for the future because Politico, let's not forget, are the sharp-dressed men who opined that Hurricane Gustav would offer the GOP a "do-over" after Katrina. #3 is unrealistic blogospheric breast-beating. I've been hearing variations of #4 since I was 19 years old and it has yet to come to pass, so I'm posting it in hopes that in a year I can e-mail this post to him and demand an explanation.

I don't want to spend a whole post about the event bitching about some things one guy said (he also mentioned that the Tribune's bankruptcy is proof that print is over, which ... readers of this blog and occupants of that space known as reality know not to be true in the slightest, though it is proof that running your business with your head up your own ass is not advisable) because by and large the thing was kind of fun in that lots of questions were asked to which the answers of the experts was universally, "... erm, fuck if we know."

Which is as it should be. We all just got here. In the lifetime of a new medium we are freaking larval. For people who've been in newspapers for decades to come up and puff out their chests and be all, "Oh yeah, what kind of money do you make, punk?!" is a bit premature. Not to mention which, on balance, the answer is as likely to be "as much as you do, and how are the layoffs treating you?" as it is, "not much, sir, I'm very sorry for existing." If we all had a foolproof way of magically growing money and cotton candy and ponies in our back yards, wouldn't it be kind of creepy? I'm not trying to pass off confusion as some kind of authenticity, I'm saying, give us a minute to collect our belongings.

Dan Sinker of Columbia College made my freaking day by talking a lot about how local papers in Chicago gave up on local news in large parts of the city years ago and that local coverage in the Trib and Sun-Times peaked in 1994, according to this Community Media Workshop study about which I'll probably have a separate post later. And, really. You can claim to be the guardians of our democracy but the argument only works if you actually, you know, do it. Otherwise you're just stroking yourself and while I'm sure it feels nice I'm not particularly interested in listening. I could have stood up and kissed Sinker, too, when he said that any time a new tool is introduced, going all the way back to the radio, people have always panicked about the implications, so everybody calm down.

As the panelists talked about innovation, about making your own site what you want local news to be, someone behind me kept shouting out, "Who pays you while you do it? Who pays the rent?" and it's not that some of the blithe "You just have to work for the love of the story and wait tables if you have to in the meantime until somebody hires you" didn't come off as romanticizing the poverty-stricken artist's life as one somehow more noble than any other. But what I think the panelists were trying to say was something we say around here all the time: If you want things to stop sucking you have to go make them not suck. You can't wait until somebody just hands you a giant platter of not-suck and tells you it's all yours.

You can't just sit back and complain, as we knock on the conservative punditry for doing all the time, that the world doesn't offer you the choices that allow you to be who you want to be. I'm not advocating poverty for anyone. I'm not arguing it's great that for some reason people aren't flinging money at those I know to be talented writers and good solid reporters. What I am saying is that eventually, when you continue to ask that something happen and it doesn't, you either change your strategy or you shut the hell up. Who pays the rent while you figure your shit out? I don't know. And nobody should be asking anyone else to answer that question for them.

Except maybe Patrick Spain. The New York Times' death date is 6/13/10. Somebody should send them a memo, maybe warn them what's coming.

A.

ps. I got kind of annoyed at the end of the thing, because I keep going to these things expecting them to be the Throw The Thieving Bastards in Prison Panel, the You Killed Newspapers On Purpose You Fuckers Symposium, a shame-the-greedy-corporate-assholes party that never really materializes. I think maybe I'm gonna have to host that panel some day, preferably out back of a tavern, with some feathers and a nice hot barrel of tar.

Weekend Question Thread

Do you speak another language besides English? What is it?

(If LOLcat counted I could say yes to this one. I have a tin ear for languages. Mr. A, on the other hand, went to Brazil for like three days and came home speaking Portuguese.)

A.

Saturday Blogwhoring Thread

Post away.

A.

*I* Know Enough Not To Get Taken, But You Morons Might Not

Last night I actually met that rare creature: A journalism academic who likes the Internet and seems to have fun with it.

My experience with the UW Journalism School's forays into exploring new media hasn't been good. At their centennial in 2005 they hosted a panel on blogging that included no bloggers, and featured Owen Ullman of USA Today trash-talking bloggers only to admit to me afterward that he read no blogs at all. So I went into this event fully expecting it to be a festival of whining about those filthy hippies thinking they can presume to put words down and have them read by people. I mean, I never.

Now, there was the usual generality of why the Internet sucks: You can destroy reputations very quickly (as if a story in the New York Times or a spot on Hard Copy doesn't do that for you), accuracy no longer matters (no examples given at all, we just presume this to be true), correcting something on the Internet happens after publication (erm, the corrections I had to write as a reporter would argue this is not that different and that a larger problem instead is the editing of posts without noting corrections are made at all, which happens mostly ... at newspaper web sites), and transparency is the new objectivity and that might not be a good thing (at which point I gave up on my vow not to drink on school nights and started glugging the chardonnay).

But by and large, this was a guy who liked the Internet and used it for what it was meant to be used for, and wasn't talking about how journalism is doomed. He even dared raise the question of whether we're all just needing to calm down a bit about the death of newspapers, given the profitability of many. I about set off fireworks, I was so happy to hear the topic raised, as well as to hear discussion of the changes in advertising (raised by Mr. A and others) and business ethics. All the journalism ethics in the world are useless if the bosses are stealing things, as you all well know.

A couple of things that struck me, though, not from Ward's talk but from the comments of others in the audience. Over and over I heard people in the audience say that though they, personally, knew that Wikipedia was not a reliable source of ironclad truth, other people, gullible people who are not them, might not be able to be trusted to figure that out. Young people, also not them, might have a harder time in the future because they are not as media-literate as the speaker presumed him- or herself to be.

The Check

I can still see the check in my mind’s eye. It was plain and it had a green background. It was filled out neatly in pen and was wrapped inside a letter requesting ad space. As the business guy at a failing college newspaper, money was practically an obsession. The check wasn’t for enough money to make us rich, but when every penny was being pinched, it was still money.

The ad talked in generic terms about educating the public about misperceptions regarding historical events and sharing proper information on their viewpoints. The ad included a Web address, a rarity in those early days of the Internet. To figure out exactly what these folks were talking about we logged on and found ourselves appalled. The site was from people like James von Brunn, the man accused of killing a guard at the Holocaust Museum this week. Among its other claims, the site stated the Holocaust was the work of a Jewish conspiracy that had never happened. It was strange in that it wasn’t a violent, angry site, but something like you’d see on those stupid Yaz commercials, where the folks there just want to “clear up a few things.”

The editor, who had final approval on all ads, and I talked a lot about this. She wasn’t feeling all that keen on the ad, but didn’t want to see the paper fold. She also made the case that if we value our own freedom of speech, we shouldn’t be shutting out others just because we don’t like the message. I argued it was hate speech and that while I didn’t want to see the paper close, what the hell was the point of keeping it open if we’d be running stuff like this. I couldn’t tell which way she was going to lean, so I told her something that I knew to be a lie: Let’s hang on to the check and if we really get desperate, we’ll cash it. I pinned the check to the bulletin board above my desk and we both went back to work. Two years later when I left, the check was still there. Despite some horribly desperate situations, I never once thought about cashing it.

I thought about that check in the wake of von Brunn’s attack. His screeds against blacks, Jews and pretty much anyone who wasn’t him had me recalling the line from “The Paper” about how when you get older, people think differently of you, but you’re the same asshole you always were. At 88, von Brunn gave us no reason to believe he had mellowed with age. His hatred was palpable and his anger manifested itself in the basest of ways.

As is now the case with the instantaneous nature of information, the Internet lit up with various theories as to what made this guy tick, with most of them centering on the “SEE! SEE! WE TOLD YOU! DHS CONSERVATIVE LONE WOLF THEORY!” end of the spectrum. The thing most of these writers tend to ignore that this idiot has been doing his shtick for decades, including his infamous attack on the Federal Reserve Board in 1981. Had the economy been booming, a white guy in the White House and his world made of lollipops and unicorns, he still would have been nuts enough to do this. Of course, conservatives immediately found their way to the keyboards and drove home this point, along with some nice name-calling of their own.

To focus the blame on a political philosophy is easy and cheap. It distracts from the fact that a man went to work, opened a door for a senior citizen and was killed for his trouble. To rail against this “lone wolf” creates a false sense of comfort for many of us. Web sites, trade shows and rallies show he’s not alone and while it’s easy to be verbally outraged, I found myself seeking introspection.

I thought about the time in eighth grade when we had a guest speaker who had survived the Holocaust. We were a raucous, obnoxious group of pre-teen twerps, but you could hear a snowflake hit the ground the whole time he was talking. I don’t think anyone even sneezed. The stories of how he watched other men kill themselves or how he watched the families of the camp guards dig through the possessions of the dead held us with a sense of horrified tension.

I thought about meeting a woman who donated much of her life savings to put a memorial dedicated to all the people (not just Jews) who had lost their lives in the Holocaust into a local park. She talked about survivor’s guilt, having escaped Germany a week before escape was no longer possible for Jews. She told me about marrying a man who survived the camps and how he never got over it. She showed me by crossing her arms and placing her hands on her shoulders how he slept every night for the rest of his life. That’s the way they slept in the camp, she said, noting he never moved at night.

I thought about my mother who boarded one of the first flights opened to the public after 9/11 to attend an event at the Holocaust Museum. She had been planning the trip for months and she was not about to be deterred. When I called her and told her to just eat the money because who the hell knew if this whole planes and buildings thing was over, she said no way. The trip was more important than anything else. She needed to go.

Mostly, though, I thought about that check. I could have run the ad and hidden under the blanket of free speech or easily cashed the check and not run the ad. I could have blamed the editor, who had final say, or pawned off the responsibility on our board of directors. But I knew all of those decisions were wrong and that I had to make sure that check stayed on that bulletin board.

Once you cast your lot with the James von Brunns of the world, no matter how small your action, you are no better than they are.

Friday Ferretblogging: Bingo Edition

No, really. Ferret bingo. Apparently this is a thing:

BINGO fans are familiar with seeing two little ducks...but two little ferrets?

Yes, a new craze is sweeping across Leeds, and it's sure to bring the house down!

Pupils and teachers at Wortley High School held their very own ferret bingo tournament as part of the I Love West Leeds festival.

Ferrets named Hemp and Caster were the stars of the show as they wriggled in and out of a very special 'bingo' machine.

The concept of the game is simple. A large box with various ferret-sized numbered tunnels is set up.

An animal is placed inside the contraption and bets placed on which tunnel it will emerge from.

At Wortley High School yesterday pupils went mad for the game – and even more so for the participants.

We gotta try this. Maybe as a fundraiser for the ferret shelter.

And here, because you are all insatiable, is a picture of Riot playing with the box my shoes came in. Ferrets: Cheap dates.

A.

Doug Feith Says Barack Obama Doesn't Get the Middle East

Let me repeat that.

DOUG FEITH says BARACK OBAMA doesn't get the Middle East:

But if the president actually does understand the problems of Islam and the West, he would not have said some of the things in his speech. He would not have suggested that the Arab-Israeli conflict is fundamentally about Israeli West Bank settlements or about Israel's denial of the Palestinians' "legitimate aspirations" for a state of their own in the West Bank and Gaza. The notion that Arab objections to the Jewish state are focused narrowly on the territories the Arabs lost to Israel in 1967 is ahistorical in a way that should be obvious: The conflict predated the 1967 war, or there would not have been a 1967 war, let alone the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-49.

[snip]

As for Iran, if Mr. Obama understood the regime's hostility to the United States, his Cairo speech would not have suggested the antagonism derives from the Eisenhower administration's role in the 1953 coup in Iran. That country's theocratic current rulers hardly mourn the overthrown leftist modernizer Mohammed Mosaddegh.

The Iranian regime clerics believe the most basic ideas and institutions of the democratic West - including popular sovereignty, women's rights and the separation of religion and state - insult God's law and God's sovereignty. To assume that the differences between the United States and Iranian regime are merely historical grievances or policy disagreements is as big an error as to ignore the ideological dimension of the U.S. conflicts with fascism, Nazism and communism.

So let me see if I've got this right. If Barack Obama would just admit that Iran is evil to the core and cannot be dealt with in any way other than turning it into a nuclear wasteland, and that Arabs hate peace and always will, then he'd prove to Doug Feith that he really knew what he was talking about.

Pardon me if I don't see the urgency in getting right on top of that.

A.

Family Values in Action

Conservatives, seriously:

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act makes it illegal to fire, or not hire, a woman because she is pregnant. The law even restricts workplace speech. Employers are warned that in a job interview they must never ask questions like, "Might you start a family?"

If Congress thought the law would end claims of workplace discrimination, it was wrong, as usual. Companies are increasingly being sued. Even a maternity-clothing chain was sued.

Waters's lawyer, David Sanford, filed a class-action lawsuit against Novartis. "If you get pregnant, you're in trouble at Novartis," he told me.

Novartis denies wrongdoing and points out that Working Mother magazine named it one of America's 100 best companies for women.

Sanford claims that his $200-million lawsuit will teach Novartis and other companies not to discriminate.

But Carrie Lukas says such lawsuits do more harm than good. Lukas is also a working mom, vice president of the Independent Women's Forum.

"If my employer decides they no longer want me as an employee, then it should be their right to fire me." she told me. "I understand the desire for people to have government step in and try to protect women, but there's real costs to government intervention."

This was discussed at length on the local teenybopper radio morning show (that I usually LOVE, by the way, since they bag on Clear Channel and record companies and conservatives all the time) and what pissed me off was that there was zero mention of the fact that Stossel and Lukas are professional conservatives, especially Lukas, who seems to be positing that the response to discrimination is to be a very good girl and beg the boss not to hit you anymore:

"Sometimes laws that are intended to help women like me actually end up hurting women like me," Lukas said. "All of a sudden, a potential employer is looking at me and thinking, 'She just might turn around and sue us.' That makes it less likely that I'm going to get hired. You raise the cost of hiring a woman like me."

Yes. The desire for a fair workplace is to blame for all unfair douchebaggery ever. That makes SUCH TOTAL SENSE. If we'd just stop demanding to be treated equally by a society that first fetishizes childbearing and then demonizes the people who do it, everything would be fine!

Many of the radio callers had horror stories about their employers fucking with them while they were pregnant (including one winner of a boss who showed up to the funeral of a worker's three-day-old baby and told her she had to be back at work in a week or she'd be canned), but there were a few that echoed Lukas here:

And while some pregnant women work harder than any man, she says, let's be honest: Most pregnant workers impose costs on employers.

"Responsibilities are shifted each time I go to a doctor's appointment," Lukas said. "That means I'm unavailable to do whatever work needs to be done during that time, which means one of my colleagues is often picking up the slack."

I have been the childless person who gets extra work because somebody had to go home and be with his or her kids, and it sucks, and it's horribly unfair. "So-and-so has a family," I'd be told, which, like I don't? Just because they don't include spawn of my own, my people don't count? And I had at least one colleague in my career who tried to make her irresponsibility all about her status as a mother, like she was so busy taking care of her kids she couldn't possibly do the duties done by other mothers in the office just fine, whose response to her nonsense was universally "mommy, please." So I'm familiar with the way childless and single people can be fucked over.

But they're fucked over by their bosses, not by the people who have kids. Making this about pregnant vs. non-pregnant ladies relieves the higher-ups of their responsibilities of staffing their shops adequately and managing their people in such a way as to leave them allowance to be human. If we're busy arguing with each other about somebody who had another baby oh my god, or has another doctor's appointment, and resenting each other, we won't notice that it's the job of the people in charge to account for this stuff in a way that doesn't involve simply pointing at whoever's left and saying, "You do this."

Not to mention which, we ALL pick up each other's slack now and again. It's not like it's any different when I get sick and someone else has to answer my phone

As usual, it is to the benefit of those in power that those with none fight with one another, which is what pisses me off so much about Stossel here:

How would the job market work without discrimination laws?

"You don't have to hire me, and I don't have to work for you," answers Carrie Lukas.

Why, it's almost like magic, the way it takes care of itself like that!

A.

More Blogger Ethics

The fuss for weeks was about what tourists and radio traffic announcers will call it, not how much it cost:

"Now publicly traded, Willis asked for and received $3.8 million in tax-increment financing from the city to redevelop the Sears Tower space."

Why isn't this the story? Why are Chicago taxpayers subsidizing a British insurance company?

"It's going to cost us about $17 million," said Plumeri. "We're bringing jobs into the city, and hopefully in the next couple of years it'll be 600, 700 jobs because we expect our business to grow rather strongly in the next three years."

Hopefully. But if we're paying for those jobs, shouldn't we just put those workers in the city payroll?

I'd also like Mr. Plumeri to describe how those negotiations went with the mayor. Very well, apparently. The Trib apparently didn't ask.

"Willis will consider spending money on marketing to help the Willis Tower name stick, but Plumeri knows it will take time. 'They can call it whatever they want, even The Big Willie,' said Plumeri, who turns 66 next month. 'All I know is that the day we announced that this building would be named Willis Tower, everybody in America knew who Willis was'."

Then why would you have to spend money on marketing to make it stick?

And really, The Big Willie? Are you a dick?

"Willis doubled its North American revenues in 2008 with its $2.1 billion acquisition of Hilb Rogal & Hobbs. It was the brokerage sector's biggest deal in a decade, Willis said."

Then why do they need a taxpayer subsidy? Maybe they should be giving us a subsidy to keep the damn city running.

"One of Willis' chief rivals is Chicago-based Aon Corp., which has about 2,500 Chicago-area workers and occupies one of the city's other big towers."

It would have been nice to have someone from Aon comment on how they feel about a big competitor getting a city subsidy.

But no. We'll just stick with The Big Willie.

We saw the same halfbright lightweight fuckery when Macy's renamed Marshall Field's on State Street. Days and days and days of coverage, "man on the street" reactions to the name change, opinions, memories of how things used to be, etc. None of which acknowledged that nobody would be richer or smarter (or dumber or poorer, for that matter) because of the change to a sign on the outside of a store in which the majority of city residents could not afford to spend very much money no matter what it was called. The amount of coverage devoted to bullshit like this as opposed to actual substantive issues is just one example I like to bring up when people want to cant to me about how journalism in the hands of television and newspaper reporters is sober and serious and all the Internet has to offer is video of cats flushing toilets.

A.

Low Hanging Fruitcake

From 2Millionth Web Log

Michele Bachmann, longtime member in good standing of the Congressional Clown Caucus. To her credit, it's quite an achievement to be a car wreck, ship wreck, and train wreck all at the same time.

Too Many Dicks

The Free Republic Internet Anthem:



A.

Obama's Fault

Our president has managed to drive racists insane.

Because the fact that they might want to shoot up a museum dedicated to remembrance of brutal murders isn't a sign they were nuts ANYWAY.

Also: You stay classy, Free Republic:

Especially since it sounds like he was one of you, or at least found a warm reception among you.

By the way, if TV commentators want to start talking about the Freepi, let's not forget Bush invited them to the White House to party with him.

A.

Our business within this common mortal life

In case anyone has ever wondered, I DO realize I'm an inconsistent, intellectually sloppy, lazy asshole a great deal of the time, online and off. I've seldom been accused of being a fierce activist, a rigorous thinker, or good soldier.

This isn't self-deprecation, just acknowledgment that I am those things many probably would describe me as. And yes, of course, I am more. It's almost 1 p.m. right now, I'm likely to be at least three people before I leave the office for home this afternoon. Like all of us, most of us anyway, I'm many selves and some of them on occasion are wonderfully brave, selfless, focused, and righteously eloquent. Mostly though, it's hit or miss.

The above musing has been brought to light by some restlessness I've felt lately, observing, as I am wont to do, the political spectacle surrounding us. Observing: most days it's that, a game watched from the distance. During the last season, the long election second half, we were players, or maybe at least waterboys. Closer to the field at least,  more invested, enfranchised, stakes were real.

Now back to observing mostly. Of course, that's a false construct (I hope) but it's helpful. Otherwise, what are we? Referees? The ball itself?

It's the "otherwise" that's making me fidgety lately. I'm a realist, I have a pragmatic, albeit fairly rudimentary, understanding of how our government organization works, how political capital is gained and spent, how consensus is built toward lawmaking, and sometimes even justice. I get that the players, and here I mean the elected, have to stay in the game to score.

So anyway, when I say that I admire our new president, it's the truth. I'm being honest when I say I was inspired by his campaign and by much of what he's done in office so far. It's also true that I've been heartbroken by more than a few of his compromises, none more so than those dealing with torture. So far I cannot discern a genuine moral or ethical motivation for his choices in this regard. I wish he was 10 times braver, I find some of his "changes," if not counterfeit, already devalued, and I wish he was more a leader and less a politician.

Likewise: when I see the progress of my own chosen tribe toward marriage equality and bringing down DADT, I'm genuinely excited. I know these are moves toward justice, and I think they are worthwhile struggles. At the very same time, I feel squeezed in by the accompanying trappings of conformity and assimilation. If I have one true self somewhere in that crowd of changing identities, I recognize that self is inherently an outsider, and I trust the strength and perspective one gains from being counter to, outside of, the mainstream.

That self wonders what marriage equality and serving in the military means when at this exact moment somewhere, there's a queer or transgendered kid who had to sleep in a bus station last night, no family, no home, no decent job, no supporting circle of loved ones.

Would the fights we are spending so much money and energy on have made a difference to the 10 year old that hung himself because the kids at school called him a faggot every day? And speaking of fighting, many of the elders whose collective shoulders we were lifted on are languishing in single rooms where the only visible culture is one of aging and death. Did they get what they fought for? Are we carrying on with them in mind?

I don't have an answer for any of this. Except that politics as a pastime seems very often incompatible with the complexities of engaging with the world.

Also that I probably watch too much television.

The Internet Wars

Sigh. Never underestimate the ability of management to change the subject to who should be posting what on their fucking Facebook pages while the world burns down.

Granted, there is an argument to be made here. I don't blog about my day job and I think anyone who does either has a remarkable lack of self-preservation or a screw loose somewhere. I don't bitch about my bosses or my colleagues or write about things I cover for other publications (though I will link). A) None of it's really that interesting in the context of what happens here and b) none of it's really that interesting, period. My last paper didn't have any rules about blogging, but that was like four years ago, by now, I hope they do, because nothing I said online back then could have gotten me fired, not on paper, anyway. (The being a huge pain in the ass could have gotten me fired many times, and I'm often mystified why it didn't, but that's another post about how sometimes your bosses are more fucked up than you are.)

Still, looking at Richtmyer's comment, I can only agree with it heartily, and argue further that this is not at all like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. This is like polishing one fork in a drawer in a stateroom on one level of the Titanic. I hope it made the AP's higher-ups feel good because certainly it served no other purpose.

A.

Bad Things Don't Happen to Good People

Amanda hits on something interesting during this discussion of Oprah:

No matter how bad you feared it was, Oprah’s even worse than you could have imagined, letting her “experts” push ideas such as “diet will prevent you from catching HPV, so don’t worry about the vaccine” and otherwise encouraging her viewers to take health measure that will actually degrade their health and work against their interests.  It also functions a neat examination of the sort of motivations that keep health woo alive, despite all evidence and common sense against it.  I somewhat disagree with the authors, who seem to think that the emphasis on woo on Oprah’s show is all about her massive ego.  It actually seems to me that it’s ratings-grabbing pandering, and Oprah just has, for whatever reason, a real ear for those things that will trip up her audience’s wishes and anxieties.  Health woo tends to rely on a few principles to keep people’s interest and money flowing:

1) Bad things don’t happen to good people.*
2) There must be a way of understanding the body that doesn’t involve actually gaining difficult and often embarrassing knowledge.
3) The world is out to get me.
4) There must be a quick, easy solution out of any problem, and it’s just a matter of finding out what it is.

Since Oprah’s audience is largely female, they aren’t completely off in their sense that the world is out to get them.  But the reasons for this and the ways to fight it that Oprah offers are fucked up.  Yes, people routinely discredit women’s intelligence.  But the solution is not, as Oprah protege Jenny McCarthy suggests, to claim a special female-only “mommy knowledge” that automatically trumps evidence and reason.

Emphasis mine, because I think there's a step farther to go here: Bad things don't happen to good people, and I am a good person. That's the assumption. You hear it every time someone is featured in the news as being poor or unfortunate, the subtext (or, increasingly, text) that "she should have done this, that, the other thing," that "I would never make that mistake." You'd evacuate before the hurricane, you'd sell some bling to buy health insurance, you'd refuse a cheap mortgage if someone dangled it in front of your face and told you to take it, etc, etc, etc. Nothing bad would ever happen to YOU, because you're smarter, more virtuous, you're destined to be okay.

And then. My years doing weekend cops reporting taught me nothing but the randomness of horror: the couple on their honeymoon pasted all over the freeway, the father out getting milk who got shot in a drive-by, the lightning strike, the swimming accident, the disappearances and deaths and illnesses all preceded by the absolute assurance that everything was fine. When bad fortune whallops you one, you always wonder, once the little cartoon birds have stopped circling overhead, where on earth everybody is who's supposed to be taking care of you? And they're off doing what you did once: picking your life apart to see where you went wrong to deserve what you got.

Then you realize, if your'e remotely self-aware, that the world is full of random shit designed to blow your life to smithereens, and that we need to take care of each other because you never know when it can happen. Or you don't realize that, and keep looking for a way to make yourself tragedy-proof, maybe through eating acai berries or something. If you find that way, would you drop me a line? Let me know, if you run across something that works.

A.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!!!??!

That sound you just heard? That wet, kind of thwack-thud sound?

No big thing. Just my head hitting a brick wall, over and over and over:

(Crain’s) — Sun-Times Media Group Inc., which has been slashing jobs and closing down newspapers to cut costs, wants to pay 20 employees up to $1.8 million in bonuses if the company is sold for a certain amount.

The owner of the Chicago Sun-Times and dozens of suburban papers recently filed the request in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on March 31, becoming the city’s second media company to do so. Tribune Co. sought Chapter 11 protection from its creditors in December.

The same day that Sun-Times Media asked for permission to pay the bonuses, it also asked the court to allow it to file under seal a version of the request that discloses the amount it hopes to fetch in a sale, as well as who would get the bonuses and how much each would stand to gain if it were to get that sale price or more.

The Chicago-based company claims in its request that publicizing that “sensitive information” would put it at a disadvantage in seeking buyers.

It would also put it at a disadvantage in, you know, existing in the real world as we know it, too. It puts it at a disadvantage in not looking like it's currently run by a bunch of politically tone-deaf moral dyslexics who not only don't know which way the wind is blowing but are disavowing the existence of oxygen altogether. I mean, what the bloody blue fuck goes through your head, people? That doesn't sound like a lot, for 20 people, when it comes to executive bonuses, but keep in mind that $100,000 is three reporters.

Once again, the Internet kills journalism. I wonder if the AP has thought about suing over this.

A.

It's Always Their Fault

Okay, seriously, I think we've reached peak moron:

KOGO Radio's morning man, Chip Franklin, has been arguing with me for over a decade. I wait for his producer's call every Monday morning, never quite sure where we're going to go.

We were wrapping up today's show, talking about shows that jumped the shark, when I abruptly changed the subject to the sentencing of Euna Lee and Laura Ling overnight to 12 years of hard labor by a North Korea court.

As I tried to express my outrage at their sentencing, Chip interrupted to say that Ling and Lee were "irresponsible" and had "put 300 million people ... at risk" by daring to go anywhere near Kim Jong-Il country.

You know, there is no injustice to which people are subjected that radio talk show nutballs cannot explain away by smugly asserting that it was simple dumbassery that got them screwed over. I'm not even arguing the facts of this case, simply noticing the pattern: Something shitty happens, and clearly whatever it is, it's the fault of the person it happened to.

I'm surprised somebody hasn't suggested Lee and Ling sell some bling to buy their way out of prison.

A.

More Fun With Diaper Dave

A quick followon to the snark Barney Frank brought that I mentioned in my previous post today.  Does anybody else get a major squick factor from this? :

Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, a Democrat, signed Sotomayor's cast during their session. Her fellow Louisianan, Republican Sen. David Vitter, had a bag of ice and a pillow on hand when the judge arrived at his office, telling her to "please be seated and relax." "I hope you all note that some Republicans are empatethic too," Vitter quipped to reporters. [sic]

Empathy from David Vitter?  DO NOT WANT.

h/t to BarbinMD at Kos

p.s. It's a twofer!  Yes, it's blogs and Google killing AP.  Not their "patethic" proofreading skilz.

GQ and Barney Frank

GQ is doing some very interesting stuff these days (and I'm not just talking about the swoon-worthy Christian Bale story).  The Rumsfeld Biblical verses story got me watching them a bit closer, and it paid off.  Lisa DePaulo has an interview with Barney Frank on the GQ Blog that's well worth reading.  (My favorite bit comes when DePaulo asks Frank about his coming out, and whether he could survive such a "scandal" politically nowadays, and Frank's response is, "I don't know.  Dave Vitter seems to be surviving."  Hee!)

But that's not what I really wanted to point out.  It's what Frank has to say about Nancy Pelosi getting hammered for what she knew and when she knew it about torture:

"I was given that choice once.  I was invited, when I was senior Democrat in the minority on the Financial Services Committee, to a briefing by two young guys from the Treasury Department.  I got there--after divesting myself outside of my cell phone and my wallet and everything else--and they said, "We're gonna show you something that's gonna be in the newspaper in a couple weeks, and we want to tell you about it."  I said, "Why is it gonna be in the newspaper?  Is this something you're announcing?"  "Oh no."  And it became clear to me, as we talked, it was something that had been leaked, and they were happy that it was being leaked, but they were gonna tell me about it beforehand.  And I said, "Well let me ask you this question.  If I listen to you now and read what you want to show me, and it then appears in the newspapers, can I talk about it after it's been in the newspaper?"  They said no.  I said good-bye.  And so I think that's what happened to Nancy.  She was given information in a way that she literally couldn't use, could not self-evaluate, because she was all by herself.  In fact, she and I have talked about this, and some others.  We have to change these rules about what you can do with briefing information." [my emphasis]

I really wish De Paulo had followed up on that comment, because I think it's one of the more interesting things to come out of the interview.  He's talking about a briefing from the Treasury--not exactly a national security issue, I'll bet.  So why all the hush-hush?  There's a reason we protect the freedom of the press.  It's because the threat of public scrutiny can sometimes keep people from doing really stupid or really bad things.  We need to find a way for Congress to beef up its power to act in those kinds of situations.  Oversight only works when Congress actually has the power to change things, either through direct action, or by exposing the situation to the public.

This is yet another situation where the power of the executive branch has grown too much.  It's time for Congress to take this bull by the horns.  I'm glad to see Frank is at least talking about it.

Ross, Ross, Ross, Ross

Oooookay:

Over the last week, there’s been an outpouring of testimonials, across the Internet, from women (and some men) who lived through these hard cases. They help explain why Tiller thought he was doing the Lord’s work, even though that work involved destroying something that we wouldn’t hesitate to call a baby if we saw it struggling for life in a hospital bed. They help explain why so many Americans defend his right to do it.

But such narratives are not the only story about George Tiller’s clinic. He was a target of protests — and, tragically, of terrorist violence — because he performed late-term abortions, period. But his critics were convinced that he performed them not only in truly desperate situations, but in many other cases as well. Over the years, they cobbled together a considerable amount of evidence — drawn from the state’s abortion statistics, from Tiller’s own comments, and from a 2006 investigation — suggesting that Tiller abused the state’s mental-health exemption to justify late-term abortions in almost any situation.

This evidence is persuasive, but not dispositive. We may never know how many of George Tiller’s abortions were performed on healthy mothers and healthy fetuses.

Because unless you tell Ross Douthat every detail of how and why and when and who, unless he knows EXACTLY how you got pregnant and what kind of problems you had, he can't judge for himself whether your abortion was justified. And that's what's important to Ross Douthat: What HE thinks of you.

The argument for unregulated abortion rests on the idea that where there are exceptions, there cannot be a rule.

No, you sanctimonious garden weasel, the argument for available abortion services rests on the idea that in no universe in the world do I want someone who could write the above sentence to be in charge of telling my doctors what to do.

I like how, as usual, it's either "no abortion at all" or "abortion at the McDonald's Drive-Thru." Nobody's saying there can't be rules. We are, however, saying that a) the reason we allow exceptions is that there are exceptions, dumbass and b) you and Rick Santorum do not get to decide what they constitute.

Which is what really pisses him off. Honestly, the whole thing is about how basically he doesn't know, for sure, absolutely, that some patient of Dr. Tiller's wasn't some irresponsible slut. As if that's the point.

And pity the poor pro-lifers, who apparently do not have access to the ballot box, or the judicial system, at all:

One reason there’s so much fierce argument about the latest of late-term abortions — Should there be a health exemption? A fetal deformity exemption? How broad should those exemptions be? — is that Americans aren’t permitted to debate anything else. Under current law, if you want to restrict abortion, post-viability procedures are the only kind you’re allowed to even regulate.

For ... Oh, man. Once and for all, everybody not agreeing with you is not tyranny. People who want to outlaw abortion in every single case are as free as anyone else in this country to get their way. They just have to elect enough people to change the court to do it. That they can't get the majority of Americans to see them as anything other than woman-hating busybodies is not the majority of Americans' fault, nor does it constitute a flaw in the system. It constitutes them sucking and that's all.

What Douthat is basically doing here is taking Megan McArdle's point (people felt they had to shoot Dr. Tiller because the political process was closed to them, which means we should give in to their viewpoint, or at least not oppose them anymore!) and making it in a slightly more weaselly fashion: This is the only thing people are ALLOWED to talk about. By which Douthat means it's the only thing HE feels free to talk about at parties that doesn't get him a look like, "Would you let it go already, man?"

If abortion were returned to the democratic process, this landscape would change dramatically. Arguments about whether and how to restrict abortions in the second trimester — as many advanced democracies already do – would replace protests over the scope of third-trimester medical exemptions.

Yes. More restrictions would end the debate entirely! Because then Ross and his fellow conservatives would have their way, and everything would be fine!

A.

Because There's No Point

In building things for the children of poor parents:

Nothing about the demolition at Collins was mentioned publicly until May 2, when Arnold Randall, who leads neighborhood outreach and legacy efforts for the bid committee, told residents at a community forum in Douglas Park that the school pool and gym would have to come down to make way for the cycling arena.

“I couldn’t believe it when he said it,” said Reginald Johns, a west-side resident who was at the meeting. “That’s the first any of us heard about it. It doesn’t make sense. They just rebuilt this gym. Why are they tearing it down?”

According to Johns and other west siders who were there, several cycling enthusiasts were on hand to endorse the plan. They didn’t go so far as to say it would help west siders conquer their fears of bike riding. But they did say that thanks to the velodrome future west siders would learn to bike ride competitively and might even qualify for a future Olympics. Residents say there was no mention of the velodrome being part of a multisport complex.

Residents say they left wondering what an elite cycling facility had to do with their community’s needs. And if the city knows it needs a bike track—or a swimming pool—why does it need to wait for the Olympics? Why not dig into any one of several available TIF accounts and build them on some of the scores of empty lots in the area?

Well, to be fair, TV news will cover the Olympics and anything related to the Olympics with the breathless enthusiasm of a teenage prom date, and regular community improvements, not so much. Building a regular old bike track for regular old people, some of whom aren't even rich or pretty, doesn't exactly bring the cameras out, now does it?

A.

Let's Give Up in Advance

Then we can kick back and say it was impossible all along, and nobody will have to do anything that's going to put them out one inch, and we can all watch Diagnosis Murder re-runs and organize our fucking recipe boxes. Jesus Bugfuck Elvis CHRIST:

The choice is emblematic of the challenges facing many news organizations across the US. They're coping with the recession at the same time that readers and advertisers are migrating to the Internet – where, fair or not, there's an expectation that what you read should be free.

The vote at the Globe is also complicated by resentment at what some employees call the "bullying tactics" of The New York Times Co., which bought the Globe in 1993. There's also some outright anger that, according to the union, management has not been asked to make comparable sacrifices. That's led some media analysts to conclude that union members will ultimately decide against management's offer, risking a more uncertain future.

But hovering over the debate is a larger question: Is there a future for a traditional, major metropolitan newspaper?

"Certainly, there's nobody in the union who thinks, 'OK, if we approve this deal, we make the sacrifices now, but we're guaranteeing our survival and there's smooth sailing,' " says Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington. He's also a former ombudsman at the Globe. "What we're seeing here is that: 'Even if we accept this offer, what is the future of the paper?' That's the big unknown that's hovering over this."

[snip]

But staff members in favor of the concessions say they don't see the reasoning behind a no vote when, in the long run, it could lead to the closure of the paper.

But that's the point, isn't it? If you don't threaten closure, if you don't act as if there is no other choice, how on earth are you supposed to get concessions in the first place? Oh, readers and advertisers are migrating to the Internet. Sure. Okay. I'm not kidding, is it only readers here who are paying attention to the fact that in spite of this not-so-great migration, newspapers are making money hand over fist? That their profit margins are bigger than Wal-Mart's? 

The established reality in journalism is that newspapers are dead, over, finished, the Internet is the new hotness and we're all just waiting for Steve Jobs to come along and make a thing that will make it all better. It's so ingrained in people's minds that arguing the point at all gets you the kind of looks people give UFO enthusiasts and the more rabid fandoms of the obscure Star Trek franchises. It is literally like arguing with Bush supporters from 2003 all over again: You're telling them about reality and they're staring at you like, "Take it back, and fuck you for mentioning it at all!"

It seems, finally, that the Guild has found something it won't roll over for, though, so that's a welcome sign.

A.

We Gave the Insurance Companies All Our Money

And it resulted in everybody being hosed, so let's require people to give the insurance industry more of our money:

It is important to understand why a "public health insurance plan" created to "stand beside" existing private health insurance plans does not provide a cure. This proposal is based in part on the experience in Massachusetts. The current Massachusetts universal coverage health reform plan is being looked upon as a model for the nation. It has had some success, yet it cannot and must not be used as a model for national reform with a "stand along public health plan" option. The Massachusetts model relies on government subsidy directed through the private health insurance carriers. There are three important observations here:

1. A 2007 study sponsored by AHIP reviewed prior experience with this type of reform model in 8 states in the 1990s (Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts (in 1996), New Hampshire, New Jersey, Vermont, and Washington). They found that  "in general..., individual health insurance markets deteriorated....Often, insurance companies chose to stop selling individual insurance in the market....Enrollment in individual insurance also tended to decrease, and premium rates tended to increase, sometimes dramatically...(And) we did not observe any significant decreases in the level of uninsured persons following the enactment of these market reforms." The result was that all these reform programs failed and went out of existence.

2. Even with state government subsidy and leverage on premium charges many residents are excused from the "universal" program because they cannot afford the premiums. Many others are faced with unacceptably high and unaffordable copayments, deductibles, and benefit limits built into the approved insurance plans.

3. The program is totally dependent on the private insurance companies and there is no cost and minimal quality control mechanisms built in. The state of Massachusetts is thus currently facing a huge and perhaps intolerable budgetary deficit.

Emphasis in the second-to-last graf mine, because:

Discussion of making sure everyone is insured drives me wild. Insurance for all is not the goal. Even good insurance for all is not the goal. HEALTH CARE for all is the goal, because even if you have a job, and have health insurance, and you need an operation or other procedure and the insurance covers 90 percent of your costs but the other ten percent is $10,000 and you don't have $10,000, you're still screwed. That's the BEST CASE scenario, that you're screwed. Insurance is not the solution.

I do not know what is difficult about this for the Bush Dogs and Republicans to get. I mean, I get you're in Congress and therefore know how awful socialized medicine really is, being that all of you are taking part in it, but one would hope you'd have friends who could tell you stories of how much fun it is to spend half a day on the phone with the hospital trying to explain that a) you paid that bill b) you don't have the money to pay it twice and c) your insurance was supposed to cover it anyway and for the love of Christ, you're trying to do a job here and keep your house in order, can't somebody get on the phone with somebody and figure this shit out?

It requires a Herculean amount of emotional strength and patience for me to sort my way through the vagaries of modern medicine every month. I find it exhausting and frustrating and homcidal-rage-inducing and I'm in relatively good health, without a rare disease or disorder, without the diminished capacity for bullshit that comes with advanced age or extreme poverty. So again, the best case scenario with insurance and at least some time to handle things would be a screwball comedy if there was anything funny about it at all. And our government seems to think the best way to handle this clusterfuck is to add more cluster and more fuck.

A.

ChicagoNow. Get it? It's NOW! Hip. Happening. Interwebs. Stuff. Things.

Looking over the list of blogs in the Tribune's new "hey, we have a network of local blogs" venture that is in beta right now, my only reaction is ... lots of sports and shopping. Yes, there's other great stuff in there (love the CTA Tattler) but it's lighter on news than it is on consumer/fan content. Exactly how much coverage of the Cubs does one city need? It's not like the papers and TV and radio and plenty of blogs already aren't acting like it's the Second Coming every time a game takes place.

Though I have to say, Joe the Cop is certainly filling a void in the information world:

If you're meeting a prostitute at a local motel, it's probably a good idea to check behind the closed bathroom door when you first arrive.  That way, once you get naked and the prostitute starts sucking on your fingers while you pleasure yourself with your free hand, you won't be surprised when a strange man jumps out of the bathroom to rob you.  On your back, nude, with your fingers in a prostitute's mouth is not a good way to confront a robber.

I'm sorry, no sarcasm, that's AWESOME.

A.

Newspapers: Still Making SO MUCH Money

So maybe not so much with the "everybody's abandoning us because they no longer love democracy and America" bullshit, please:

But, of course, charts only tell half the story. Here’s the other half:

$37.8 billion vs $21.1 billion

Want to take a guess at which one is newspapers’ ad revenue from 2008 and which one is Google’s?

Believe it or not, the bigger number–the one a healthy $16.7 billion higher is the newspaper industry’s. That’s right: Google’s bringing in just over half what the newspapers haul in on print advertising alone. Which makes the current publisher anger towards Google more than a little disingenuous. Sure, Google’s share is growing and newspapers’ is shrinking, blah blah blah. Five years ago, Google’s entire revenue was a scant $3 billion. Newspapers’ print ad sales for 2004? $48.2 billion.

Print: far from dead.

Here's the root of the problem, really:

Newspaper execs talk with exasperation, as if they’ve tried everything they can. But they define “everything” so narrowly that it renders the word almost meaningless. In reality, as they watch their massive river of money slowly shrink away, they’ve tried almost nothing. They had a couple hundred year head start on Google, and yet they collapse in a heap here at the dawn of a new age.

They didn't want to fight for it. As if you get what you want any other way.

I am so looking forward to this conference on Saturday.

A.

How You Can Tell Kathleen Really Likes Him

Obama has reduced her to metaphors:

Beyond delivering core messages of partnership and a new beginning based on mutual understanding and respect, Obama made three big scores: He essentially neutralized Osama bin Laden. He managed to call Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a hateful ignoramus without ever mentioning his name.

And, he affirmed Western values of democracy, human rights, religious freedom and women's right to self-determination -- all while making Muslims feel complimented, appreciated and understood.

No small feats.

To delegitimize the man whose name rhymes with his, Obama had only to show up and not be George W. Bush. Osama the cave-dweller's latest blurt, timed to pre-empt Obama's speech, was more pathetic than threatening -- the muffled bleat of an emasculated warrior powerless against an enemy he can no longer demonize.

Osama is the withered and quivering Gollum -- seething with envy and nursing his precious hatred -- to Obama's robust and hope-driven Frodo. The forces of darkness and light personified.

But ... but ... socialist racist Latina wisdom and porkulus spending! Stuff! Words!



A.

Today on Tommy T's Obsession With The Freeperati - mixed bag o' nuts edition

Good morning, everyone! Before we get started, I'd like to address a scurrilous rumour that due to last week's "Obsession" getting front-paged by Kos himself, I've become insufferably immodest.
Not true.
I was insufferably immodest long before that.

Peasant.

Now that that canard has flown innuendo, let's cycle the airlock and see what putrid posts the Freeperati have to offer...

Our appalling appetizer - Apparently Freepers don't have credit cards!‏

Credit-Card Fees Curbed
The Wall Street Journal ^ | 05-20-09 | SUDEEP REDDY
Posted on Wednesday, May 20, 2009 6:28:09 AM by GOP_Lady
Sweeping new restrictions on credit-card companies would ban extra fees and fluctuating rates and arm tens of millions of consumers with more information on their debts.
Starting in February 2010, a Senate bill passed Tuesday would ban practices such as charging consumers to pay by phone and sudden surges in interest rates. Payments above the minimum due would be applied to balances with the highest interest rates. Information once relegated to tiny print must be made clearer, and consumers will soon be told how long it would take to pay off a balance if they pay only the minimum due.

To: GOP_Lady

This will simply make it more difficult for marginally creditworthy consumers to get credit.

5 posted on Wednesday, May 20, 2009 6:32:19 AM by Mr Ramsbotham ("Baldrick, to you the Renaissance was just something that happened to other people.")

Um - hasn't that been part of the problem?

To: GOP_Lady

I know many people who will be happy to see this type of government control.
The problem was not the credit card companies/banks but people living way beyond their means. If this were not the case they could take their business elsewhere.
It’s not good news if freedom is what you’re after.
When the governmnet(sic) “lightens your load” in one instance it doubles, triples, or quadruples it in another.

7 posted on Wednesday, May 20, 2009 6:34:10 AM by Boucheau

Boucheau is seriously conflicted here.
On the one hand, he disagrees with Mr. Ramsbotham that people living beyond their means is a problem. Or maybe it is.
In the next sentence, he allows that in either case, this is bad news for Freedom.
They do, however, agree that any legislation signed into law by President Obama is bad, because he's Obama.

To: ninonitti

Another example of redistributing wealth and scr...... responsible people who pay their bills on time etc...

10 posted on Wednesday, May 20, 2009 6:38:48 AM by Sacajaweau

Yeah! Because of the part of the bill that restricts interest rate increases.
These people clearly inhabit Bizarro-world.
The only "wealth redistribution" I see in credit card-land is out of working stiffs' pockets to MBNA.

To: JDW11235

“I also don’t necessarily agree it’s the CC companies’ job to educate them.”
The terms are very clearly laid out in the CC agreements.
Most people are too lazy to read them.
Most people are too stupid to read what they sign and deserve to be had more than they are!

47 posted on Wednesday, May 20, 2009 7:39:40 AM by dalereed

Those poor old financial institutions! Stupid people need to have clauses in their credit card contracts that obligate them to be sent off to a work farm, because they're stupid, and banks are all nice and stuff.

And of course, there always has to be a killjoy:

To: Boucheau

The problem was not the credit card companies/banks but people living way beyond their means. No, that's not necessarily true at all. In the past, I've been in situations (major car and home repairs, medical bills, and wholly unexpected college/university fees) in which I would have been royally screwed if I did not have a credit card to back me up.
The credit card companies are in fact THE problem, with their fraudulent lending and pricing policies, and countless pitfalls, any one of which leads to major fees and interest rate hikes at usury levels, courtesy of those fine-print "Important Amendments" we all get in the mail from time to time. The whole system, as it is now constituted, is one big debt trap.
Having been screwed myself by my credit card issuers in the past, I actually agree with Obama on the need for this legislation because this industry is wildly out of control, with prior congressional complicity (Kennedy, Biden, and Dodd).
Sorry to burst some bubbles on this thread, but even a clock is right twice a day.

12 posted on Wednesday, May 20, 2009 6:45:36 AM by Virginia Ridgerunner (Sarah Palin is a smart missile aimed at the heart of the left!)

That's "Stopped clock":.

Communist.

Well, more and sillier Republicans after the jump, so follow me into the dark, children....

You Don't Even Have a Name

What a bunch of whiny, entitled bitchery. Outing somebody because he said you were wrong? Automatic fail.

Honestly. I try to tell the newspaper kids I talk to about this kind of stuff all the time: someone criticizes you, why get into a two-week shitfight over where your critic went to school, who he "really" is, whether he's taken as many classes as you, etc etc? It just makes you look like a petty asshole. Why not instead focus on the substance of the criticism: Does this person, even if he goes by iLikeBigJugs553, have a point about some fact or interpretation of fact that I have published?

If so, either incorporate that into your next bit of work, correct the current post, or just resolve not to be such a dumbass in the future. If not, then ignore it because nobody cares. I mean, I know we bag on the Freepi a lot around here but during that week when they all called me an ugly whore, would it have benefitted me in any way to post sexy photos of myself and then demand they do the same so we could see who truly lived up to standards of physical beauty? So much easier to point, mock, and move on.

You hear this constantly from mainstream media pundits sniping back at bloggers, too: Oh yeah, well who are YOU, Mr. Imginary Internet Person, to point out the sky is not purple as I quoted Newt Gingrich saying it is but is in fact blue? You don't have a paycheck! I mean, so why? The sky is either blue or it isn't. I do not understand the impulse to prolong one's embarrassment at making a mistake by wanking about the credentials of the person who pointed it out. Except for that, of course, it makes the argument about something other than how you screwed up.

Take what's useful about the criticism you get and use it, even if it comes from some anonymous asshole on the Internet. Shove the rest.

A.