Antidote

(h/t EricLykins on KnoxViews)

Stupid and ugly election

Linky love...

As for us Democrats, in the last two cycles we elected the first female Speaker of the House, had the first competitive female presidential primary candidate, and elected the first black president. We saved our country from Great Depression 2.0, began winding down a senseless war, passed sweeping reforms that will begin the long overdue process of overhauling our health care and financial systems, made college more affordable for millions of students, and passed the largest middle-class tax cut in U.S. history.

So we got us some progressive change - some of it half-assed but change nonetheless - in spite of the just-say-no obstructionists who want to stop all progress and angry mobs who want to "take our country back." To 1861.

Go. Read.

Even Republicans prefer socialism

Two college professors, Michael Norton of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke University, surveyed American beliefs about current and optimal distribution of wealth. The vast majority - 92% - preferred the distribution of Sweden (unlabelled in the survey) over America's own hugely unequal distribution.


From the abstract:

All demographic groups – even those not usually associated with wealth redistribution such as Republicans and the wealthy – desired a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.

I wonder what the teabaggers would say.

(h/t KnoxViews and GOOD.is)

Running government like a business

Even when your house is burning down, you're on your own.

Yes, had the South Fulton fire department put out the fire, no one else outside the city limits would have ever signed up for the subscription again, and bye-bye additional revenue. That's why a government body shouldn't set up its revenue stream in a way that requires profit and loss calculations, rather than cost-benefit calculations.

(h/t KnoxViews)

Consider the source

Even a hard right-winger thinks the teabaggers are crazy and bigoted and around the bend:

Instead, he remarks, his party turned toward demagoguery. Inglis lists the examples: falsely claiming Obama's health care overhaul included "death panels," raising questions about Obama's birthplace, calling the president a socialist, and maintaining that the Community Reinvestment Act was a major factor of the financial meltdown. "CRA," Inglis says, "has been around for decades. How could it suddenly create this problem? You see how that has other things worked into it?" Racism? "Yes," Inglis says.

(h/t metulj on KnoxViews)

Poking my nose into Tennessee's governor's race

If you're interested in me defending a Republican against the scurrilous bullshit attack of a wingnut, see this blog on KnoxViews.

Corporation for Congress

Incredible!

“Until now,” Murray Hill Inc. said in a statement, “corporate interests had to rely on campaign contributions and influence peddling to achieve their goals in Washington. But thanks to an enlightened Supreme Court, now we can eliminate the middle-man and run for office ourselves.”

Next up, lobbying for a Supreme Court nomination.

(h/t metulj on KnoxViews)

Missing in action

Hop across the big pond for this report (h/t R. Neal on KnoxViews) on threats against President Obama. Maybe overwork is why the Secret Service couldn't be troubled to arrest William Kostric.

Who's MIA? The American media.

Wants me dead

The evil man who massacred churchgoers in Knoxville, my hometown, would kill me if he had the chance. There are others, too, and he appeals to them to act.

It's sobering.

STFU, Republican gasbags

Joe Conason says what I've also been saying for weeks: Put up or shut up about election theft in Minnesota. So far, *crickets*.

Conason and I are both shouting into the whirlwind. The wankernuts on the right are not evidence-based. They don't care about the facts. They don't care about the will of the people. They only care about power.

They will always be lying liars, which is why they hate Al Franken so much.

Future of news, if any

"Networking, Ad Revenue and Reinvention", by my blog friend Newscoma on the new site NewsTechZilla, which she shares with a partner, has me thinking about the parlous future of the news business. It costs money to find out the facts, and yet hardly anyone is willing to pay for it.

Reader unwillingness to pay is not new. Advertisers pay the bills, not readers, and they always have (where 'always' means 'in my lifetime').

Goodbye paper

One future we all know: Paper's over. No point discussing it.

As soon as advertisers figure out that they can get into just as many eyeball-deploying wallets on line as they get from dead trees, the whole expensive process of distributing inky gray newsprint to every suburb will immediately become too uneconomical to continue. I've read a daily newspaper for more than 40 years, but I dropped my Boston Globe subscription last fall. I feel like a sponger sometimes, but I was tired of recycling unopened papers.

Newspaper advertisers have been overpaying for years, anyway, and that wasn't going to go on forever. When I do get a paper, the first thing I do is to recycle the circulars. Sooner or later, the sponsors are going to figure that out. A little time watching a conveyor at a newsprint recycling plant should be enough.

The demise of paper has one consequence that newspapers have long realized: Video and audio clips are now part of the newspaper, just as text is part of news sites descended from TV such as CNN.com. One of the New York Times's chief competitors is in fact CNN.

Slice and dice

Once you're on line, though, the viewport of a news site is different from a newspaper. Why would a local paper even try to compete with the New York Times in national and international coverage? Truth is, local papers haven't been competing with the NYT forever (same definition). Part of my childhood, I read the Knoxville News-Sentinel, whose idea of international coverage was four one-paragraph blurbs - lead paragraphs off the wires - twice a week. They outsourced their national coverage to the AP and UPI or, preferably, the other Scripps papers. Nonetheless, the Sentinel pretended to cover all the news.

On line, local papers are learning not even to pretend. The MetroWest Daily News only puts local content on line. National stories without a local tie? Maybe they make the dead tree edition, maybe not. On line, the Nov. 5th headline was "MetroWest voters help elect first black president".

Why should they pretend? Their readers are already on line, where they can easily get far better and more complete coverage. As Newscoma puts it, quoting Vibinc:

Readers can get the AP feed ANYWHERE.

What's happening is the end of the vertical integration of news-gathering. Very few organizations will have the profits to compete at all levels and in all general interest areas. Really, how many national newspapers do we need? There will be some larger regional newspapers, too. The LA Times and the Chicago Tribune may have to settle for regional, though at worst the LA Times's potential region is pretty damn huge.

Location, location, location

Everyone else is going to need a niche where they can be the big dog. Some of those niches are going to be verrry small. Current well-reputed semi-national papers such as the Globe had better have terrific, detailed, and much more easily navigated sports coverage. If they don't, sites will spring up to cream off those highly motivated readers. (Hmm, business idea?)

Local coverage is a vital competitive advantage for professional reporters. Instead, newspaper consortiums are hollowing out. Community Newspaper Co., now owned by Gatehouse Media, has done this in an attempt to capture economies of scale. The problem is that Gatehouse and their predecessors have interpreted that as calling for staff cuts. They can always pull in a story from the next town over, as they do in the weekly I still subscribe to (and used to write for). Problem is, their readers want to read about their own town, not what the school committee did about mold in their elementary school.

At the bottom end are the amateurs and semi-pros who report news. Maybe they report about quilting. Or maybe they actually cover the police and fire reports in their towns. Some of them with an extreme tolerance for boredom, occasionally punctuated with real drama, may even cover the meetings of local political boards. All of these topics are valuable to someone, which is why Gatehouse Media is suing the Globe over its knock-off of Gatehouse's local aggregation pages.

Unfortunately, it appears that the subversives at the Globe who are trying bring it into the blog age don't have enough executive buy-in to get convenient links from the front web page. I'm no newbie, but I still have trouble finding the new media and had to search to find Your Town. In fact, the Globe site overall needs much better organization. CNC, unbelievably, is ahead.

It could be that the Globe executives are still pushing paper and that they want their site to be hard to use. If so, they've succeeded, though that word is an oxymoron in this context. They're only cutting their own throats.

Paying

Like 'Coma, I don't know how to pay for it. Only the Wall Street Journal has succeeded at getting revenue from on-line subscribers, and that's because of its special and tax-deductible specialty as the indispensable business paper. Even the New York Times, America's number one national general interest newspaper, failed with TimesSelect.

I'd like to think that a micropayment system might work, but I just don't believe it. No one wants to read with the meter running. (Micropayments would be a far better solution to email spam, as Bob Metcalfe long ago argued in the departed dead tree edition of InfoWorld.)

Ad it all up

That means we're stuck with advertising. Web browsers make many wicked annoying ad types possible. The Globe now pops up ads when you click a link. I kill them as fast as I can. Pop-unders are hardly better. But the worst ad type is a hijacking ad; the Minneapolis Star Tribune pops up borderless ads with transparent backgrounds. Try to click a link under the ad pane and you get jerked over to a commerce site that you're probably not interested in since you were trying to click something else. In fact, the Star Tribune probably gets to charge its sponsors more money because they generated a click-through, even if that does border on fraud.

There are going to be product placements, too. When I used to still be willing to watch all the fluff on CNN TV, about half the stories felt like placements to me. The conscientious sites will label ads. Many others won't.

Futurepress

Crystal balls are notorious producers of bullshit. This one may be no exception.

Print media already serve a market segment rather than everyone who wants news. Most people don't read much if they can avoid it. They'd rather see pretty pictures. Print-oriented news sites that descend from newspapers need to recognize that not everyone wants to read, and they should serve those who do want to read. No doubt, they still need to be visually attractive and easy to use, both for their core customers and to attract new ones.

Print media companies will not be virtual corporations, though sometimes they will look like them. Instead, they will have their niches, and they will aggregate everything else. Each day will be a rap track that samples heavily from other sources. Assigning rights and payments will be a matter for lawsuits, evolving markets, and eventually statutes.

To this point, news aggregators mainly suck. Most aggregation sites are automated, ugly, and hard to navigate. I use the blog aggregator BlogNetNews, but the learning curve there is steep, and their rankings are easily manipulated. Technical problems will be solved, not by magic but first by proprietary software and then by open source. Or maybe open source will get there first, last, and only.

The sites that the aggregators aggregate will have all sorts of sizes and specialties. The advertisers will determine which ones survive as businesses and which are left to hobbyists. If I claimed I could tell in advance what type of organizations would be best suited for the new environment, well, I might be the Bernie Madoff of new media.

One thing that will be especially hard to judge is the relationship of one site to others. Do you share traffic, or are you competing for the same traffic? With this post, I want to share NewsTechZilla's traffic. Since I'm not working this subject every day, that's probably fine with my blog friends, but what if I did want to poach on their preserve? Is building a larger conversation more important than hosting the conversation? It will depend...

The answer will affect how much link-sharing sites want to do. The Globe links to me, primarily I'm sure because I asked early. They'll get stingier later. Most of the Globe site, in fact, is already verrry stingy with links, which is one of the reasons I suspect that their business people really don't understand how doomed their current business model is. (Or maybe their owners at the NYT are making them, as a hedge. Except that the NYT does not encourage its commenters to link, either.)

My suggestion for a rule: If you have even one order of magnitude more traffic, link away. You'll help the little site, and its owner will be grateful. (Against that, CNN used to give me links, and I constantly bit the hand that fed me.)

The new media winners will be good enough that they can link freely to interesting and vivid one-offs without losing their readers to the linked site. Their readers will continue to trust them to find - and sometimes, to re-report - nuggets that would otherwise wind up buried in the avalanche of mostly crappy content. Chances are, for example, if you won't help your commenters link to their blogs or whatever, you don't have enough confidence in the uniqueness and quality of your content to build a permanent audience.

I don't make the news

What's the upshot for reporters and columnists? The generalist days are probably gone, and this is a loss. Both reporters and columnists need areas of special expertise. Don't blame me; I'm just calling it as I see it.

Tom Friedman and Bill Kristol have been superficial or wrong so many times that it's a wonder they still have jobs that don't involve upselling French fries. Many political bloggers do a better job without expense accounts, though of course you have to find them. That will be the future role of op-ed editors.

Reporters need forensic accounting or business experience or foreign studies or public administration or something else that will permit them to do much more than rewrite press releases. They need math and science. (Sorry!) Because so many of us crazy semi-pros and amateurs are willing to spend Sunday afternoon writing analyses like this, reporters need knowledge that is rare, and English usage is not rare enough.

Reporters will need one integrated skill that columnists are supposed to have: the willingness to call bullshit and make it stick by deft display of facts. They don't need a visible point of view; there's plenty of that for free. But the jejune, faux balanced story structure pioneered by Time Magazine of thesis-antithesis-superior shrug is not going to cut it.

Reporters will need to be able to write short. Yeah, I still need to figure that one out. But at least I gave you cut-lines.

Update (1/5): One classic example of expertise that takes one slice of news stack and owns it is Nate Silver's 538.

It can't be racist if it's a joke

Another episode in why liberals think the GOP harbors racists - because it does. You'll notice that they don't make jokes that bear on the race of white people. Because, hey, that's not funny!

Although there is a competing satire called "Chip the Magic Cracker"...

Secret ballot card check

Businesses and their wingnut allies are frantic that the Democrats may enact card check as a means of authorizing collective bargaining by a union. They say that their concern is to prevent coercion of workers, but there's a little more detail: Their concern is to prevent union coercion, while leaving the field open for management intimidation and coercion.

In fact, card check has been the law of the land previously without the world coming to the end the Chamber of Commerce fears if those people gain more power. Still and all, the secret ballot is anti-coercive, and its loss could be a bad aspect in what is on balance a good idea.

Why not have both? If the state of Oregon can conduct its secret ballot elections by mail securely, why can't unions conduct their elections by mail in a way that avoids management intimidation but retains the secret ballot?

(h/t R. Neal at KnoxViews)

Too late for a shredder

The AP awakens from its slumber long enough for Matt Apuzzo to slap down the Bushist deregulators and their favored lobbyists at the root of the mortgage crisis:

The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown...

Careful there, you might commit journalism!

(h/t R. Neal at KnoxViews)

No enemies to the right

One reason the frothing lunatic wingnuts believe there's a liberal media is that they are so far to the right that anything even in the conservative part of the mainstream looks liberal to them. Here's a comment on a story in the Knoxville News-Sentinel that dares to acknowledge the geological age of the earth:

One more example of the anti-God, extreme liberal bias at KNS.

It's really no surprise that this fundie has the handle GWB4Ever.

The KNS, by the way, is a completely Republican newspaper, though it remains lightly tethered to reality.

(h/t smalc on KnoxViews)

Wild-ass guess

Guessing the number of electoral votes in the coming election is like guessing the number of jelly beans in a big glass jar at the county fair. Televised pundits do it in self-serious tones that suggest they get paid waaay too much. Bloggers have a lot more fun with guessing, for instance, this contest (now closed) at KnoxViews.

Since I was slipping in my own silly guess at the last minute, I was out of time to try to figure an advantageous guess in the contest, and I just said what I thought. Using the CNN electoral map calculator, here are the states and how I called them:


That's 353 for Obama and 185 for McCain. I awarded Obama all the big toss-ups - Florida (27), Ohio (20), and North Carolina (15), but I just couldn't see him taking Indiana (11) or Missouri (11) even though he may, and North Dakota (3) - are you kidding me? Even if McCain takes all six of these, he loses unless he turns around Pennsylvania (21) and another state.

The last is no doubt why Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com is so optimistic:


The mode of his simulations is about 380! This is so optimistic it scares the hell out of me.

I only realized this morning that my Obama total of 353 is one of Silver's model's most likely outcomes.

In any case, this looks like an election that's not close enough to even try to steal.

Temple of their familiar

Wingnuts write columns filled with calumny about Obama's Greek columns at Invesco.








This is stupid for any number of reasons, not the least of which is Duhbya's old stage.








The meta problem, as usual, is that the media takes foolish, hypocritical Republican bullshit and rushes it into print with none of the context that would make it look foolish and hypocritical.

The Republicans know that they can form impressions in the weak-minded by flinging this poo, and they lack the good conscience not to.

(h/t Metulj at KnoxViews)

Update (8/29): An ironic take on the media's sloppy eagerness to forward the most stupid Republican BS.

Update (8/31): Unbelievably, McCNN has updated their bullshit story and floated its vacuous Republican drivel back into their "top" stories.

Surveillance state

The only privacy we have left is inside our heads, and maybe that's enough. --Tom Reynolds (Jon Voight), Enemy of the State

Want to drive into a city but you're not willing to pay taxes to maintain the roads? User fees, extracted by transponder. It'll even be pitched as good for the environment since it gives an incentive to take public transportation.

Want to be able to find missing persons like the woman near Seattle. (And who doesn't?) Get a routine court order for cell phone proximity records - if you're not the FBI and can't mail-merge a National Security Letter. It's not a nefarious conspiracy, but a cell phone can be used to find political dissidents. It's only a matter of time before it actually happens.

Sure, but who would do that? Well, Tom DeLay used the FAA to find the Democrats from Texas when they were fighting his eventually successful attempt to change the rules for the sole purpose of helping Republicans.

You think there are any records of what you have watched, purchased, eaten, written, or surfed that can't be obtained by an interested bureaucrat? Nope. Sorry. Duhbya has the power, and everything goes down on disk these days. Searching it is not Constitutional, but the Washington Democrats are meekly acquiescing.

So don't be surprised if the NSA knows every move you make in a few years. Or today.

(Cross-posted from KnoxViews in response to a blog about this.)

Today's comments

On KnoxViews:

What RWGs (rich white guys) have

Lawyers, good ones. They set up obviously phony deals like the one-vote annexation, and the courts find in their favor anyway - because some paper filing was unassailable or because some other paper filing missed a deadline.

RWGs don't bother with transparent travel expense pretexts. They know how to set them up right. Lawyers (and doctors, too, by the way) combine personal travel with professional activities - seminar over breakfast and golf in the afternoon in, oh say, Hawaii. Then they deduct the expense or get reimbursed for it without quite offending our sniffers.

That still doesn't make the alleged behavior right, but it does turn a black-and-white (ahem!) story into shades of gray.

One more thing: I'm surprised no one has mentioned Cherokee Country Club. Going out on a limb, I don't think any of the women in this thread are members. Just sayin' is all.

Karl Rove...

... covered in it? Now there's a happy thought!

On KnoxViews.