2007 archive

Check this out.

Ontrack.

My customers have used them. They are very good at what they do.

Lee Iacocca:

Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”

Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

With a tip to Susie.

Oh, my. And honesty, virtue, and morality twist slowly, slowly in the wind.

Susie.

Yeah, he got a little wierd there towards the end. But a lot of the time he got it right.

I have enjoyed B. C. since I first started reading the Virginian-Pilot.

John Cole asks the question:

At what point did the Oval Office begin to resemble the backroom at the Bada Bing?

I will attempt an answer.

January 20, 2001.

Prologue: Senator Fred Thompson conducted himself with honor during the Watergate hearings and acts with (at least some) talent on Our Favorite Show.

Not too long ago, the big news was that Mrs. John Edwards’s cancer had returned.

After consultation with her (and it seems as clear as it can ever be to an outsider that the Edwardses love each other very much), Mr. Edwards decided to continue his campaign for president, with Mrs. Edwards’s explicit support.

And that waste of newsprint, Michael Smerconish, was all over the Edwardses like a bad suit, along with many of his wingnut compatriots.

I am waiting eagerly to see what he has to say about Senator Fred Thompson’s (as yet undeclared) candidacy in the light of today’s news. Will he suggest that Senator Thompson should chose to spend time with his family, rather than seek public office?

Inquiring minds want to know.

New Jersey–going to the dogs.

New Jersey wildlife officials are investigating what could be the state’s first documented coyote attack on a human after a recent backyard attack on a toddler in Middletown.

Note that this is not northwestern New Jersey, where they have bears. This is right near Sandy Hook (where, by the way, there is a nude beach that a friend of mine used to visit religiously–well, at least, with a sense of worship).

Or blustering buffoon?

Too many persons have forgotten that Sharpton first appeared on the scene with the deplorable Tawana Brawley case.

Dick Polman recounts the record.

Addendum, 4/12/2007:

Susie.

Reflecting back on this post, I received an email today from Mr. Loudell requesting that anyone who’d like to talk about these issues to join him tomorrow at 12:45 p.m. at The Academy of Lifelong Learning, at Arscht Hall, on the University of Delaware’s Wilmington campus.

Big time.

I frankly don’t care whether Don Imus gets fired or not. He’s made a career out of being inflammatory. And now he’s the one in the fire. Let him sweat.

Big whoop. Howard Stern is still on the air, quite joyfully naked.

(I listened to Stern once, for 15 minutes. All he talked about were his testicles. Having no interest in his testicles, I have not listened to him again.)

What is a damned shame and what should cause Imus suffering is that he destroyed whatever joy the Rutgers women’s basketball team could have had in finishing second in the NCAA tournament–that is, second in the nation–in his bid for cheap, racist laughs.

I was talking about Don Imus with my brother today. He and I don’t necessarily land on the same political squares. He cited examples of other on-air conduct, not involving race, which he finds just as offensive as Imus’s remarks, but which has not attracted attention and protests.

Back to Imus, though: both my brother and I grew up under Jim Crow. (And, if you haven’t lived it, it might be difficult to understand it.)

(Aside–Now, in our part of the world, Jim Crow was not nearly so bad as it was in the Deep South. Black persons were not expected, for example, to step off the sidewalk into the street when a white person was on the sidewalk, as they were in certain areas. But Jim Crow was a very real thing.)

My brother and I agreed on two things.

Thing one: Imus is a racist.

We are both Southern Boys. We know racism when we see it.

To paraphrase something I heard on the radio today, if you don’t have those words inside you, they won’t come out of you.

He may be a kind-hearted racist. So were many of the racists we grew up with.

But he’s one amongst many. Racism isn’t dead, though, God willing, it’s on the run. Another racist exposed. Big deal. There will be more.

And, even growing up in a segregated world, with segregated schools, all-white government, poll taxes, and all the other trappings of the institutionalized subjugation of black persons, we never heard in public in our rural Southern county the type of language with which Imus soiled the air waves. Which leads to

Thing two: No matter what words they have might used in private, “Jigaboo” and “nappy-headed” were not words even the worst racists we knew during our growing up would have said in public.

Addendum, 4/11/2007:

Two columns worth reading in today’s local rag:

Annette John-Hall on racism.

Karen Heller on the debasement of public discourse.

And in the Washington Post:

Michael Meyers (no, not that Mike Meyers) on freedom of speech.

Interesting essay on this topic over at Delaware Liberal:

Most media observers assert that accuracy and objectivity has been swept away by the confluence of two social changes. One is the change in television journalism from a public service to a moneymaking entertainment ventures for the parent corporation. It is laughable to think that Katie Courric and Stone Phillips consider “objectivity and accuracy” part of their mission. Likewise, as newspaper readership continues to dwindle the “4th estate” newsroom depicted in the novel “All the President’s Men” is as relevant to current newspaper operations as a lascaux cave painting.

I’m a sucker. I tend to think that most reporters try to be objective.

Note: I said reporters, not “commentators.”

Q: If a commentor does comments, what does a commentator do? Commentation?)

But one does not obtain objectivity by having three quotes from one side and three quotes from the other side.

Objectivity means holding the claims of both sides up against the facts.

Somehow, much of contemporary journalism has lost site of the concept of objectivity requires testing claims against facts.

Addendum, 30 seconds later:

I urge you to follow the link and check the comments. Alan Loudell, long-time program director for WILM-AM (until it was gobbled up by the Borg Clear Channel and now with WDEL-AM added a long and thoughful comment to the post.

I have met Mr. Loudell, though I’m certain he wouldn’t remember me, in the course of arranging a Girl Scout tour of WILM. He is a gracious gentleman.

Dick Polman on early presidential preference polls: Basically meaningless.

Consider these hypothetical match ups, taken one year prior to previous presidential elections, culled from the Harris and Gallup surveys:

1. In February 1995, Bob Dole was favored over incumbent President Clinton by 51 to 45 percent. (In November 1996, Clinton beat Dole by 49 to 41 percent.)

2. In March 1991, the senior George Bush was beating Mario Cuomo by 78 to 17 percent, and few even heard of Bill Clinton. (In November 1992, Clinton beat Bush by five points.)

3. In February 1983, Walter Mondale topped incumbent Ronald Reagan, 47 to 41 percent. (In November 1984, Reagan hammered Mondale in a landslide.)

4. In April 1975, incumbent Gerald Ford trailed Ted Kennedy by 50 to 43 percent. (Kennedy never ran, and 19 months later, Ford lost to Jimmy Carter in a squeaker.)

Earlier, I referred to the dispute between Geraldo Rivera (who used to be a good reporter–his Love Canal expose ranks with some of the finest reporting ever) and Bill O’Reilly (hoick! ptui!).

Here’s what one of the columnists (not the editors) at the Virginian-Pilot (the newspaper I grew up with and the one that serves the area in which the crash that sent Rivera and O’Reilly reeling happened) has to say.

Note: I snipped a dissenting view from an elected official from the quotation below for the sake of continuity, because the quotation referred to an earlier part of the column which I chose not to quote, but it’s all there if you follow the link. Or even if you don’t:

I’ve got to hand it to O’Reilly. He made Geraldo Rivera sound like a sage.

“Cool your jets,” Rivera told O’Reilly when they discussed the case Thursday on television. “It has nothing to do with illegal aliens. It has to do with drunk driving.”

(snip)

We could use a rocket to launch illegal immigrants out of America and we’d still have drunks on our roads.

Maybe the next stretch of fence we finance should be between bars and cars.

I couldn’t have said it better. From today’s Letters to the Local Rag:

I’m tired of hearing folks complaining about politicians interfering with military decisions, in regards to our war against Iraq.

It was a politician who created the tiny group of incompetent political appointees who got us into this horrible mess to begin with.

It was a politician who dismissed a secretary of state with superb military and diplomatic credentials because his opinion differed from the groupthink of his tiny organization.

It was a politician whose “personal loyalty above all” credo dragged us deeper and deeper into this quagmire, ignoring the advice of any and all who had a different opinion.

It is a politician who now gambles with the global reputation of America as a peace-loving bastion of freedom in a frantic effort to salvage his reputation, his place in history.

It is a politician who refuses to admit that he’s wrong – no matter what the price.

Trudy Rubin:

The most fascinating thing about Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Damascus was . . . her head scarves.

She had a different print square for each Mideast stop, each coordinated with her suit. If only I could look so elegant entering a mosque; my head is usually swathed in some black swatch that has been crumpled into my bag.

You say I’m not giving the lady credit for jolting a failed Bush policy? Or I’m remiss for not denouncing her traitorous behavior in encouraging the enemy?

Double nonsense.

Endless legislators, both Democratic and Republican, including Sen. Arlen Specter (R., Pa.), have trooped through Damascus and met President Bashar al-Assad in recent months, with nothing to show for it. Ditto for this visit.

As for “aiding the enemy,” the arrival of such a high-ranking Democrat probably did reaffirm Assad’s belief he can sit Bush out and wait for a Democratic successor. But Assad was already wedded to a wait-’em-out strategy. The responsibility for that lies with the White House, not the speaker of the House.

But it has been a handy diversion for the Current Federal Administrator, whose finger breaks everything it touches.

Here.

And here.

Whoops! That was a different airline.

A Northwest Airlines flight was canceled because the pilot was yelling obscenities during a cell phone conversation while people were boarding, and cursed one passenger, a federal official said Saturday.

The pilot of the Las Vegas-to-Detroit flight was apparently in a heated cell phone conversation in the cockpit, then went into a lavatory, locked the door and continued the conversation, Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor said Saturday.