Thursday talk radio update

KBLG's replacement for Bill O'Reilly turns out to be Fred Thompson, whose entry into the presidential race did so much to liven up the 2008 campaign. Not just Thompson, as it turns out, but also his wife and his brother.

It's sort of like Hannity RFD: all the usual right-wing blather without the noise and passion. Thompson always comes across as a guy who doesn't think very much or work very hard, and that's essentially the style of his show. He and his wife were trying to make hay out of some story that the mainstream media picked up on based on some poll that supposedly was methodologically suspect, but they made such a hash of it that not only could I not decipher the methodological errors, I couldn't even figure out what the poll supposedly showed, or why its appearance on MSM was evidence of liberal bias. True, I often miss stuff while delivering papers, but I'm pretty sure that this bit was simply incoherent.

The one thing Thompson has going for him is that at least he sounds like he really does believe the stuff he says. Maybe that's the actor in him. Hannity makes a critical error: He sounds like he's too smart to really believe some of the dumb stuff he says. Thompson sounds like he is being as smart as he knows how to be. But his folksy charm, such as it is, is somewhat offset by his wife, who comes across as a bit of a harpy.

Thompson's show was so soporific that I switched over a time or two to Limbaugh, who clearly is enjoying his recent notoriety. At the lead-in to one break, his announcer said, "You're listening to the leader of the conservative movement in America." Eat your heart out, Newt Gingrich.

Warren Olney, who always gums up the works on Thursday by injecting a lot of facts and balance into his show, had an important discussion about how whether taxpayers are entitled to know exactly which companies are benefiting (other than AIG) from all of the AIG bailout money. As a reporter, my sympathies lie with disclosure, but I can see the argument about why it might screw things up in this case. My friend Rob Natelson would agree: It's another example of why it's a bad idea to intertwine public and private enterprise.

Meanwhile, Hannity himself was veering closer and closer to accusing Obama of outright treason. He hinted at a belief that Obama's policies are not merely wrong but are deliberately wrong, designed to weaken opposition to a purely socialist agenda that will overthrow constitutional government in the United States.

One thing you have to admire about Hannity is his intellectual flexibility. He is perfectly happy to argue one minute that Obama is hurting the country by talking down the economy to further his socialist political agenda, then in the next minute to talk down the economy himself in order to further his conservative political agenda. And he is happy to argue one minute that Obama is an inexperienced and hopeless naif, battered by economic realities he can't understand, then argue in the next minute that Obama is outsmarting us all, cleverly destroying America while fooling most Americans into thinking he is on the right track.

If we can't get the fairness doctrine back, can't we at least get an FCC rule requiring that talk-show hosts wait at least one segment before totally revamping their points of attack? It's confusing for us old folks.

Hannity also had on Jim Cramer of CNBC, who blamed recent stock market declines on Obama's plan to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Experience has taught me not to take people seriously who yell for a living, so I was skeptical. It's hard for me to understand why the stock market would crater today because tax rates might increase a couple of percentage points two years from now, which may be why I am not a professional stock adviser.

But NPR did talk to a couple of professional stock advisers on "All Things Considered." One said that the market is so weak now that every time there is a small rally, as there was on Wednesday, traders who have been sitting on tanking stocks take the opportunity to sell, driving the market back down. That made some sense to me. The other said that people now aren't focused on the long term at all; instead, they are reacting to day-to-day events, ignoring fundamentals of both individual businesses and the economy as a whole. I don't know if that makes sense or not, but it's definitely a counterpoint to Cramer and to CNBC, which Jon Stewart pretty much destroys right here.

Out of my head

I don't remember what the first song was I learned by heart. But I'm pretty sure that if they unplug all of my memory circuits, as they did to Hal in "2001: A Space Odyssey," the last coherent words out of my mouth would be the lyrics to one of the following three songs (punctuation shamelessly improvised):

Rock-a-bye baby,
In the tree top.
When the wind blows,
The cradle will rock.
When the bough breaks,
The cradle will fall,
And down will come baby,
cradle and all.

Or:

Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white,
They are precious in His sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world.

Or:

Jesus loves me, this I know,
For the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to him belong;
They are weak, but he is strong.

Yes, Jesus loves me.
Yes, Jesus loves me.
Yes, Jesus loves me.
The Bible tells me so.

Classifieds

Some more pretty grim news about the recession and about newspapers.

Out of my head

A semester or two ago, I was telling my German students that in order to be proficient they would have to memorize all of the definite and indefinite article forms, plus corresponding adjective endings, for all four grammatical cases and all three genders, plus the plural. The obvious pain in their faces led me to say something like, "It's not that bad. You've memorized a lot harder things than that already."

Which started me wondering: How much memorized stuff is floating around in my head? I don't mean odd little facts (date of the Battle of Austerlitz: Dec. 2, 1805; number of times Babe Ruth struck out, 1,330) or bits of doggerel ("you are my candy, girl, and you've got me wanting you"). I mean songs, poems, tables of data -- more or less permanent additions to the body of things I can recite from memory.

It's not something I'm particularly talented at or have worked very hard at. But it strikes me that there is quite a bit of stuff in there, and I thought it might be interesting, at least to me, to write some of it down. So that's what I will do here, from time to time, under this heading.

No doubt I will get some stuff wrong. Your corrections are not welcome. The goal is not to reflect the world as it is but as it exists inside my head.

It will be boring stuff, mostly, I suppose. Skeptics are welcome to skip anything they see under this heading.

For openers, let's try those German endings:

Definite articles:

Masculine Neuter Feminine Plural
Nominative der kleine Wagen das kleine Bier die kleine Jacke die kleinen Jacken
Accusative den kleinen Wagen das kleine Bier die kleine Jacke die kleinen Jacken
Dative dem kleinen Wagen dem kleinen Bier der kleinen Jacke den kleinen Jacken
Genitive des kleinen Wagens des kleinen Biers der kleinen Jacke der kleinen Jacken

Indefinite articles:
Nominative Neuter Feminine Plural
Nom. ein kleiner Wagen ein kleines Bier eine kleine Jacke keine kleinen Jacken
Acc. einen kleinen Wagen ein kleines Bier eine kleine Jacke keine kleinen Jacken
Dat. einem kleinen Wagen einem kleinen Bier einer kleinen Jacke keinen kleinen Jacken
Gen. eines kleinen Wagens eines kleinen Biers einer kleinen Jacke keiner kleinen Jacken

Adjectives unpreceded by an article

Nom. kleiner Wagen kleines Bier kleine Jacke kleine Jacken
Acc. kleinen Wagen kleines Bier kleine Jacke kleine Jacken
Dat. kleinem Wagen kleinem Bier kleiner Jacke kleinen Jacken

See, that wasn't so bad. But there will be a test.

UPDATE: It made a nice table in the draft version. Here, not so good. Sorry.

A young man's fancy

Dang, I get baseball fever on a day like this. Somebody throw me a glove.

UPDATE: MSU Billings plays its first home game on March 31. Sounds a million years away.

Limbaugh as platonic ideal

In praise of Rush Limbaugh, Andrew Breitbart writes: "Only talk radio with its emphasis on Socratic debate over raw emotionalism and with Mr. Limbaugh in the driver's seat has escaped the left's clutches of pure media dominance."

I think Socrates just ordered a double shot of hemlock.

Sunday talk radio update

I was listening to Bill Cunningham last night while doing the monthly billing. Part of his show was a tribute to Paul Harvey, which wasn't handled particularly well but was at least worthy. I listened to Paul Harvey growing up a kid and figured he must have been a million years old then. I haven't heard him much in recent years but always sort of figured he would be around long after I'm gone. He had a voice that could have made reading the commodity market reports sound interesting. Nobody ever had a better delivery.

Then Cunningham went on to proclaim the "I hope Obama fails" agenda, and wound up accusing liberals of labeling conservatives as Nazis. It wasn't clear to me exactly whom he was blaming for this. At one point, he blamed the mainstream media, but that was almost certainly untrue. Whatever its failings, the MSM rarely calls people Nazis who aren't actually, you know, Nazis.

The funny thing is, during the election campaign, Cunningham regularly referred to "Barack Hussein Obama" as a Bolshevik. He did it every week, as if he meant it to be a serious label. I wondered if he had any clue what a Bolshevik actually was.

I suppose it's marginally worse to be labeled a Nazi than a Bolshevik. But guys who toss around the latter term don't have much grounds to complain about the former.

Beer here

Ronnie Crocker, one of my beer-drinking friends from Texas, has started a beer blog for the Houston Chronicle. He and I worked together at the Bryan-College Station Eagle many eons ago.

There are many Ronnie Crocker stories, mostly drawn from the late mad rush for a couple of pitchers of beer at the Chicken Oil, which closed a half-hour after the paper's final deadline. A high degree of both editing and drinking efficiency was mandatory.

But one of my favorite stories was when he was a young, and short, reporter for the Eagle and I was a prematurely grizzled assistant city editor. He had a late-breaking story that I had to trim to make fit, and he complained mightily.

I tried to soothe him. "You'll never even notice the difference," I said.

"Hey," he said, "when you're my height, every inch counts."

More talk radio

When I wrote below that the Senate had voted for legislation prohibiting reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, I hadn't yet seen this quote from Denny Rehberg:

Anyone who thinks that talk radio only tells one side of the story doesn’t spend much time in front of a radio. The fact is, talk show hosts regularly accept calls from listeners that disagree with them, and the debates are lively and informative. The last thing we need is the federal government stepping in to referee an active discussion to declare winners and losers. I’m proud of the Senate for passing this important safeguard, and I hope the House of Representatives acts quickly on this legislation.”

I'm guessing that Denny doesn't spend much time in front of a radio. Limbaugh openly acknowledges that he accepts calls from listeners who disagree with him only if he thinks it will promote his own arguments. Hannity often takes calls from people who disagree but only occasionally hears them out. Usually, he interrupts them repeatedly, ridicules or mocks their positions and dismisses them as Kool-Aid drinkers and Obama maniacs. Michael Savage and Bill Cunningham are openly rude to callers who disagree with them and often hang up on them. Glenn Beck is so incomprehensible that it usually isn't even possible to disagree with him. Even O'Reilly, who really did welcome opposing viewpoints, usually allowed callers only a sentence or two before butting in to explain how it really was. Only Dave Rye really gives a respectful and full hearing to opposing views and he, of course, has no national reach.

Lively? Informative? Not in this town.

Perhaps it also is worth mentioning that not a human being in this country, so far as I know, including zero percent of the people who favor the Fairness Doctrine, thinks the government should referee radio discussions to declare winners and losers. Denny, my friend, you are spouting utter nonsense.

Saturday cat blogging

Isis on her perch.

My wife thought her (the cat's) facial markings resembled the yin and yang symbol, which started her on a search of oriental symbolism and imagery. Somehow she wound up at Isis, which I also liked because it is short, is the title of a Bob Dylan song, and sounds like a word a cat might use if cats were slightly more language oriented.

Good news

Searching high and low, the Outpost editor manages to find some good news about newspapers.

Thursday talk radio update II

I have been remiss in failing to mention Yellowstone Public Radio's weekly wrap-up of the Legislature with Jim Gransbery and Jackie Yamanaka. It's always interesting and sometimes enlightening.

But this week I heard Scott Sales say two things that made no sense to me.

One is an old bugaboo: He said that Montana government has to learn to live within its means. What can this possibly mean? As I have argued before, government has no means. It does provide services that are of value: running water, sewage, garbage pickup, police and fire protections -- and that's just at the city level. But government has no power to simply charge market rates for those services. Instead, it can charge only what its customers, acting through their elected representatives, permit.

So when Sales, who was elected to help decide what means government should have, says that government should live within its means, what is he trying to say? That government's current means are by some miracle optimal and should never be changed? That we no longer need a more perfect union because the union is now fully perfected? Or what?

The other thing he said was that we can't spend our way to prosperity. I hear this all of the time, but does anyone believe it is true? People spend their way to prosperity all of the time. It is, in fact, the basis of the capitalist system: Somebody gets an idea for a product or store, raises money through investors or loans or savings or inheritance, spends the money to launch the product, and rakes in the prosperity. It's a great system. A major reason why new businesses fail is insufficient capitalization, i.e, they can’t afford to spend their way to prosperity.

The same is true at both the individual and government levels. Take a smart, poor kid out of the ghetto, give him some decent clothes and an education, and he is likely to prosper. Maybe he could do it anyway, but the money helps.

In the same way, a country invests millions in building an interstate highway system. Next thing you know, there’s a Town Pump at every exit. Guess what: We just spent our way to prosperity.

Obama proposed, and Congress has passed, a massive attempt to spend our way to prosperity. Even Sales acknowledged that it might help in the short run. And the short run is all that matters. Everybody knows we can't just keep spending money forever. The theory of the stimulus is that it will relieve some short-term pain for the unemployed, help keep government employees on the job, stabilize the economy, and help fuel a recovery. I'm the first to admit that I have no idea whether it will work. I suspect that Sales doesn't either.

So what does Sales really mean? I think he means that taxes should never be raised and that he doesn’t want to spend money to fight the recession. So why not just say so? Why dress it in clichés, as though it were the wisdom of the ages?

Unfair to the right?

A couple of commenters below argue that I am being unfair to Sean Hannity for his attacks on Obama and unfair to Limbaugh for rooting for Obama's failure. Not so.

Dave Rye says that I have been unfair to Limbaugh by using only one sentence from him and omitting context. But Limbaugh himself says that he was invited to submit 400 words to a "major American print publication" describing his hopes for the Obama presidency. Limbaugh says he replied: “Okay, I’ll send you a response, but I don’t need 400 words, I need four: I hope he fails.”

With this context, let's consider what four years of a failed Obama presidency might look like: rampant unemployment, hundreds of thousands of home foreclosures, banks failed or under government control, deficits raging out of control, a divided Congress, terrorists on the loose, uncertain and endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And let's consider what a successful Obama presidency might look like: the economy clicking on at least three cylinders, the stock market rising, banks securely in private hands, peace abounding, Democrats and Republicans working in harmony, torture in disrepute and America's international reputation on the mend.

To be sure, an Obama success story would contain elements that Limbaugh wouldn't like: the first steps, at least, toward universal health care; more spending on infrastructure, unwelcome debt, a slightly more progressive tax system. That's what he gets for losing elections.

But compare the outcomes. Limbaugh finds Keynesian economics so unpalatable that he is willing to have millions out of work to prove it wrong. He finds Obama's foreign policy so distasteful that he is willing to have thousands die to prove he is right. This is the stance of a man who loves his country? No, it is the stance of a man who is willing to sacrifice his country on the altar of his ideology.

As for Hannity, I have listened to him for at least a couple of hours a week for several years. If he has ever made a coherent case against Obama, I have missed it. Instead, he spent the six months before the election complaining that Obama associated with a terrorist and with a preacher who said at least a half-dozen stupid things over the last 20 years. He has spent the time since the election complaining that Obama is a socialist, without much more than a hint of what that means.

SIDEBAR: Once again, Jay Larry Lundeen criticizes me for taking on right-wing radio on a regular basis but giving "mainstream media" a pass. As I have tried to explain to him, apparently without success, I write about talk radio on Thursdays because I listen to it while I am delivering copies of the Outpost for a dozen hours each week. If left-wing talk radio was available in Billings, I would write about it, too.

The closest thing we have to left-wing radio is Yellowstone Public Radio, which does provide an interesting and useful counterpoint to right-wing talk. But it does so primarily by doing actual reporting and by giving ample time to contrary points of view. This week, for example, Warren Olney led an important and wide-ranging discussion of how to treat suspected terrorists in an Obama regime. Fascinating stuff, but too nuanced and complex to sum up in a short blog post, especially by a guy who is bouncing out of his car to deliver papers every minute or two.

Then there was this, on "All Things Considered": An anchor interviewed Sen. Judd Gregg, who was critical of the Obama budget, and said, in essence, that Obama is proposing exactly what he said he would do if he became president and that voters elected him with that understanding. So why shouldn't Republicans accept that?

Gregg said, "Well, that may be NPR's position." I don't know if was or not, but regardless of what motivated the question, it was legitimate, and the right-wing hosts would never have posed it. To his credit, Gregg gave a plausible answer, something to the effect that Americans did not elect Obama to drive the country into bankruptcy.

In the long term, it's in the best interests of even conservatives to have some liberal ideas out there.

Thursday talk radio update I

Thursday was the last day (except for a Friday rerun) of Bill O'Reilly's radio show. He no longer draws much mention here because I usually teach German during his show, but this actually is something of a loss.

My liberal friends tend to lump O'Reilly in with Hannity and Limbaugh, but that's quite unfair. O'Reilly has his annoying quirks, but he is the only one of the bunch who made a genuine effort to be fair to Democrats in the presidential race. And he is something of an environmentalist, by talk radio standards.

At worst, he is far more listenable than the alternatives. Limbaugh wants America to fail. Hannity's show has become a three-hour-a-day Obama bashathon. Glenn Beck seems to have become utterly unhinged. Savage already was.

Without public radio, hope would cease.

No wonder Democrats are happy to get along without the Fairness Doctrine. If you were Obama, wouldn't you love having Limbaugh and Hannity as the voice of the Republican Party? You bet you would.

Friday cat blogging

OK, I am not becoming a cat blogger. This simply announces the news that my wife and I have acquired a cat, courtesy of the animal shelter, named Isis.

Seems like a perfectly acceptable cat so far. A bit shy, but not spooked. Reasonably friendly, but not pushy. Took her about five minutes to find the exact spot on top of the couch where my daughter's cat liked to hang out and where I would hang out if I could fit there.

It has been a pretty long time between animals for us. My wife's allergic to cats. I object to dogs (not my fault: my father was a mailman -- the dog's natural enemy -- for 44 years, and I inherited it from him). So we compromised. Well, she caved. But a cat it is.

Down, down, down

Electric City Weblog looks at the stock market, and sees a judgment on Obama.

Pat Buchanan, of all people, takes a more measured, and considerably scarier, look.

Lives of others, indeed

Intelligent Discontent (see Update below) also takes note of National Review's list of the top 25 conservative movies. The list has drawn its share of derision around the blogosphere (how could "Birth of a Nation" have been left off?) but both Intelligent Discontent and I are struck by the inclusion of "The Lives of Others," the 2007 German movie that won an Oscar for best foreign-language film.

Like Intelligent Discontent (and William F. Buckley, apparently) I think it's a terrific movie. Because of my interest in German, I have seen it a half-dozen times, in whole or in part. But it never occurred to me to think of it as a conservative movie.

The playwright at its center, for example, is perfectly content to play along with the East German regime, writing bloated historical dramas that praise the glories of socialism. Only when a friend with more political courage than he has commits suicide does he commit a "disloyal" act, and even then he acts with great caution, by publishing an anonymous article in the notoriously liberal West German Stern magazine (you should read what Stern had to say about Bush).

The East German intelligence agent who shadows him is as straight a Communist arrow as humanity could devise ("Socialism has to begin somewhere," he says when he leads his supervisor to sit for lunch with him among the common workers). His doubts about the regime arise because of the corruption he witnesses, not because he disagrees with Communist ideology. Once he does start to doubt, well, pretty soon he's reading that Marxist ideologue Bertolt Brecht.

If anything, the movie shows how absurd it is to apply American notions of liberalism and conservatism to East Germany. For all its Marxism, East Germany was profoundly conservative in its structure and social mores. The playwright was a liberal at heart, doing his best to get by in a society that rejected liberal values. The agent was a conservative at heart, finding it increasingly impossible to match his traditional values to the job he was being told to do.

What makes the movie wonderful is not its politics but the way it depicts the Stasi agent's gradual change of heart: utterly without sentimentality, almost without emotion, but moving and fully persuasive. It's art, folks, not politics.

Lee update

Newsosaur explains why Lee Enterprises' debt restructuring isn't as good news as Michael Gulledge would like you to believe. Also, see here.

But that's not what bugged me about Gulledge's front-page note. I was bugged (slightly) when he said that the Gazette has been the region's primary news source for 184 years, which means it was being delivered by travois to tribes along the Hi-Line before John Bozeman was born (the error was fixed online, but if the correction was noted anywhere, I missed it).

I was bugged (considerably more) when he wrote that Lee's debt would never impair its ability to serve advertisers and readers. That's just demonstrably not true, and it's insulting to staffers that already have been laid off. The advertisers whose ads all got smaller during the recent redesign also may be surprised to learn that they haven't been impaired.

I was bugged (even more) by the statement that the Gazette reaches 86 percent of adults in the market, all without defining either the market or what he means by "reaches." I suspect the number includes people who have had a copy of the paper blow across their front yard on a windy day.

Finally, I was bugged (most of all) by the fact that so many other Lee publishers chose to run notes almost identical to Gulledge's: see here and here and here. Gee, I thought Lee didn't dictate content to its publishers.

UPDATE: Sounds like Intelligent Discontent is more bugged than I am.

UPDATE 2: For more evidence that great minds think alike, also see publisher's notes here, here and here. For a response, see here.

Q: How cheesy is it to run eerily similar publisher's notes throughout the Lee chain?

A: Very cheesy.

Overcovering Indians

At the Electric City Weblog, Rob Natelson has had a couple of posts on coverage of Indian issues in the Missoulian. The thrust of the posts is that Indians get disproportionate coverage compared to other groups, such as taxpayers.

Some commenters argue with the professor's methodology. I also am skeptical. Many stories of interest and relevance to taxpayers, for example, don't contain the word "taxpayer." Same with most of the various job titles he mentions.

But I also think the post misses something about Indian coverage and about news coverage in general. I say this as someone who covered the Indian beat at The Gazette for a couple of years and once wrote a proposal for Lee Enterprises to create the sort of Indian beat that Jodi Rave now holds. I never actually submitted the proposal because I figured I wouldn't get the beat and I didn't want to risk losing what Indian coverage I had. But I suspect that the reasoning I used was similar to the reasoning that eventually created the position.

First things first: I can't speak for the Missoulian, but at the Gazette Indian coverage was never an easy sell. A lot of Indian-related stories were of no particular interest to white readers, and Indians themselves were not the demographic group most appealing to Gazette advertisers. I always felt that I had to make a case for covering Indian stories, and from what I hear, that still holds true.

So why create an Indian beat? My thoughts ran along these lines:

1. Indian reservations, because of their quasi-sovereign status, deal with issues that simply don't exist elsewhere, and they are complex issues that tend to run across reservation lines. So, for example, time invested understanding Northern Cheyenne governance would save some of the time required to learn, say, Fort Peck governance (this was less true for the Crow, which still ran under its own rules at the time).

2. Issues involving social pathology -- alcoholism, drug addiction, disease, crime, poverty, etc. -- tend to be rampant on reservations. In a way, they are the canary in the coal mine for all kinds of social problems, and you know how reporters love that stuff.

3. Most reservations lack much news coverage of their own, so it is a place where real journalism can make a difference. Not much profit in that argument, but it does fit in with what journalism ought to be about.

4. Every powwow makes a great photo. Features abound on reservations, and they sometimes have a national audience.

I don't know that Natelson would disagree with any of this, but he may not understand that when a beat like this is created, that in itself leads to the sorts of disproportionate coverage that he detects. Reporters typically don't just get stories at random; they get stories off the beats they cover, from the people they talk to regularly and the governmental bodies whose meetings they attend. So once a decision is made to cover a beat, disproportionate coverage is almost guaranteed, unless you can afford to cover every significant beat you can think of.

That's why, for example, the Gazette has so much crime news. It isn't that crime rules our lives or even necessarily because crime news sells (although it does, to a point) but because reporters are assigned to cover that beat to make sure nothing important gets missed. But assigning the reporter not only leads to the big stories but to all sorts of smaller stories that happen to get churned up in the course of trolling the beat. The result is a disproportionate emphasis on crime.

When I left the county and Indian beats at the Gazette to start the Outpost, I continued to get a disproportionate number of county and Indian stories for a few years afterward. That's where my sources were. Natelson himself may recall asking me once on his radio program how I managed to break an important county story that nobody else had found. The answer was simple: I still knew the beat and, even though I was no longer working it daily, I was still getting tips off it.

In the same way, the Outpost got its biggest scoop ever off the Indian beat. Because both Ron Selden and I maintained contacts on the Crow reservation, we broke the story that then-tribal Chairman Clifford Birdinground was taking kickbacks from a car dealer a full year before the indictment was handed up. Nobody else even touched that story until legal documents were filed.

And so it goes. Disproportionate coverage is built into every beat. As reporting ranks decline, those gaps are likely to grow larger -- and provide the professor with more to complain about.

Thursday talk radio update

I finally heard a good case against the stimulus package on Friday. It didn't come from Sean Hannity, who made a nonstop case all week long that the package was the final step in European-style socialism. Nor did it come from Rush Limbaugh, who was busy rooting for America to fail. Nor Glenn Beck, who was unable to shake his conviction that the Fairness Doctrine is just around the corner. Nor Mike Gallagher, whose sole function in life appears to be to ensure that Hannity isn't the dumbest host on talk radio.

Instead it came on that liberal bastion, Yellowstone Public Radio, where economist Niall Ferguson argued that the current financial crisis won't be cured by Keynesian spending. In fact, he argued, the problem is excessive debt, so adding to the debt won't help. Nor will it necessarily help to put more money into consumers' pockets, especially if they use it go shopping for Chinese-made goods at Wal-Mart.

What he did call for wouldn't necessarily make conservatives happier than they are now: Essentially, he called for nationalizing failing banks and cutting mortgage rates.

I don't know whether he's right, but he made a creditable case. It's just interesting that after Hannity went on and on for hours and hours on the topic, he never once made a case even one-tenth as compelling. He scarcely ever cited a fact at all, and I'm not sure that he ever even mentioned Keynes.

It took the liberal media to do that.

Lucky break

Whew. It's a good thing that all that global warming talk is just a hoax.

Not in this country

www.isgeorgebushpresident.com says it in a word (h/t balloon juice).

Pro-freedom

I've been mulling over this post for a while. My initial response, posted in comments there, was made up of roughly equal parts of snark, genuine offense and a vague sense of humor. Rob Natelson responded with a list of editorial stances he favors for pro-freedom newspapers that I can't quite get out of my head.

None of this is aimed at Evelyn Pyburn or the Big Sky Business Journal. My own labors in the weekly business have made me an admirer of her tenacity, and she is a bulldog on open meetings and open records issues. She also is a committed libertarian on economic matters, which makes her editorials and columns a tad on the predictable side.

Voters consistently and decisively defeat libertarian candidates at the polls, but one might still wonder: Would we be freer people if we elected libertarians? My guess: We would be a weaker, poorer country with dirty, polluted cities, a crumbling transportation system and unlimited access to pornography and marijuana. Might be worth it.

But to Mr. Natelson's proposed editorial stances for a pro-freedom newspaper:

1. Promoting public-private school choice even if you personally think public education is a good idea. There is no serious movement afoot that I am aware of to prevent people from attending private schools or even home schooling. There is a dispute over whether parents with school-age children should get a tax break to send their kids to the school of their choice. Sure, we could all have easier lives if the government gave us preferred tax treatment, but what does that have to do with freedom?

2. Consistently opposing federal pork, even if it’s for Montana. Only vaguely related to freedom, if at all. There is no constituency for pork, except its immediate beneficiaries, who are most of us. And one man's pork is another man's broccoli. If you consider that our freedom derives in part from access to resources, then I guess you could argue that pork diminishes freedom by using resources less efficiently. But it's a thin connection.

3. Favoring a return to a market-based health care system. Odd choice. Our public-private health care mix actually limits freedom in important ways. For example, it ties people to jobs they don't want so they can keep insurance. And for the 50 million or so Americans with no insurance, it means they are just an illness away from financial ruin. I guess our system does mean that we have more choice over doctors we use. But just try to find solid information about who the bad doctors are.

4. Opposing tax hikes, even though the money would go for your favorite programs. Just bizarre. How does it limit my freedom if I willingly pay taxes for programs I favor? I can't build highways on my own, or maintain parks, or fund a library, or raise an army. I have to pay taxes to do these things. And sometimes, like it or not, prices go up. Do you have any idea how much an aircraft carrier cost in 1776?

5. Cutting regulations that prevent people from engaging in consensual conduct, even when you disagree with that conduct. OK, I'm for that, which is why I think gay people should be allowed to marry and Michael Phelps ought to be able to puff on a bong without stirring up a national snit. So Rob and I are both liberals on this point.

Of course, what's really remarkable about the list is what isn't on it. Nothing, for instance, about the freedoms that really do matter: habeas corpus, banning torture, an independent judiciary, open government, the First Amendment, and so on. My guess is that Evelyn is on the side of freedom on most of those issues, as are, in fact, most newspapers.

Maybe more so, even, than most conservatives.

Bad, bad Lee is down

The news just keeps getting worse for Lee Enterprises.

UPDATE: The Missoulian says "Pish!". And Intelligent Discontent replies, "Posh!"

The view from Billings

Somebody in this town besides me is reading Andrew Sullivan.

Thursday talk radio update

Funny how the world turns. Hannity had on Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, to blast the stimulus plan. As always on Thursday, I was bouncing in and out of my car, so I may have missed something that made Grassley sound better than he sounded to me. But he sounded to me like he was swallowing Hannity's line with mouth wide open: The stimulus won't work; it's a plot to destroy capitalism; it'll bankrupt the country; Republicans have to hold the line, etc.

A couple of hours later, Grassley was on NPR, and he sounded like an entirely different fellow. He said Republicans had legitimate concerns about the plan, but he was confident that he could work in a bipartisan fashion with his friend Max Baucus to come up with something that would pass both houses, most likely by stripping the bill of items that don't really have much to with stimulus but properly belong in appropriations.

This made perfect sense to me, and it gave me hope that we might actually succeed in getting past partisan barriers, at least in the Senate. What I heard on Hannity made no sense and gave me no hope.

Hannity keeps wondering why Obama mentions him and Rush Limbaugh so often. He thinks it's because Obama is afraid of him or is trying to set the stage to reimpose the Fairness Doctrine. I think it's because Obama is a whole lot smarter than him and is perfectly willing to paint the GOP as the party of Hannity and Limbaugh. If the November election told us anything, it is that the public isn't buying what Hannity and Limbaugh are selling. From their perspective, voters picked the worst possible Democrat (of those with any chance to win) and the worst possible Republican, and appeared to do so for exactly the reasons that Hannity and Limbaugh hate the most.

It was striking on Thursday to listen to "To the Point" on NPR and hear a thorough, nuanced discussion on what, if anything, should be done about global warming, followed by Hannity, who dismissed the whole issue in a handful of sentences and essentially called it a hoax. You can believe what you want about global warming, but if you think that it isn't even worthy of discussion and that all the scientists who are working on the problem are liars and cheats, then you really have no place in the national discourse. You are a loser.

Which is where Hannity and Limbaugh are. And Republicans are afraid to cross them. And that, I suspect, is just fine with Obama.

More layoffs

The Missoulian is cutting six positions. And Lee Enterprises CEO Mary Junck will have to settle for her measly $850,000 salary. Meanwhile, I have heard but have been unable to confirm that Lee stock has been delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. Anybody heard anything?

Meanwhile, France is finding new ways to help its struggling newspaper industry. Before you go off blasting this as un-American, remember that the first U.S. bill providing preferential postal rates for newspapers was passed in 1792.

UPDATE: For a detailed (and lengthy) analysis of what wrong with newspapers and what to do about it, go here and here. The posts are especially enlightening on the long history of government subsidies for news.

David Crisp, R.I.P.

I was thinking of complaining about my day, but then I realized that not every David Crisp had it so good.

Smarter?

Ed Kemmick gives space today to the ideas of Don Tapscott, who argues that people born between 1978 and 1994 are "smarter, quicker and more tolerant of diversity than their predecessors."

My thoroughly unscientific response, based on a few years of knocking around high school and college campuses:

1. Smarter? No. Intelligence doesn't vary much from generation to generation. A kid who grew up on a farm during the Depression may have been vastly ignorant of the wide world, but he knew how to saddle and ride a horse, fix a fence, milk a cow, pluck a chicken, raise a garden, fix a tractor, read the weather, hunt a varmint, read the Bible and carve a living out of hard dirt. You think he was dumber than a kid who knows how to Google?

2. Quicker? Yep, at least on certain tasks. Students today seem substantially more world wise, adaptable and sophisticated than the ruffians I grew up with. But that comes at a price. The "rote learning" that education consultants criticize gave earlier students a sense of history and context that is lacking in many kids today. If you don't know that the Civil War started in 1861, you can probably get through life just fine. But if you don't know that the Civil War happened in the 19th century, then you don't have enough information for Wikipedia to help.

3. More tolerant of diversity? No doubt about it, at least on certain push-button issues: race, sexual orientation, abortion.

One more thing: Tapscott trashes the lecture method. That's popular, and most teachers, including me, are always looking for alternatives to simply telling students stuff. But when I think back on my most memorable college classes, it's amazing how many of them mostly involved just listening to a professor talk. There is something to be said for just letting smart people talk about the things they know and love. It's called education.

SIDEBAR: Intelligent Discontent has been posting a lot about education lately. Well worth a read.

Natelson update

My post on Rob Natelson's mystery posts finally drew a response from Mr. Natelson, buried deep in comments over at Electric City Weblog. I'm not sure why a conservative would think it's a bad thing that poor people can't afford to send their kids to ritzy private schools, but Rob seems to think it is. He offers two solutions: (1) Get rid of public schools altogether, or (2) give parents back some of their tax dollars through vouchers or tax credits so they can choose (presumably less ritzy) schools of their own.

It's safe to presume that Obama won't propose to do away with public schools, since that would be the effective end of his administration, so I guess we are left with vouchers or tax credits. Let's use "vouchers" as code for both.

As a strict adherent of the "let a thousand flowers bloom" philosophy of education, I'm a longstanding agnostic on vouchers. If they work, fine. And if the union doesn't like it, tough.

But I've never quite understood the logic of the voucher argument, especially in rural states like Montana. No matter how much the globe warms, a thousand flowers ain't gonna bloom in Ekalaka. And public schools, whatever their demerits, have one advantage in efficiency that's hard for private schools to duplicate: They are the closest possible schools to where kids actually live, which saves transportation dollars, if nothing else. No matter how big the vouchers are, they are never going to be big enough to send a kid to Sidwell.

Then there's the philosophical argument that public schools benefit society as a whole, not just the kids who are in them. Even if nobody in your family ever sets foot inside a public school, you supposedly are better off knowing that the soldiers who defend your country have learned to do math, and that the clerk who takes your order can read and write, and that when Joe the Plumber goes to the polls, he has learned enough civics to know how to vote intelligently, and why it matters.

That's why people who don't have kids, or whose kids have graduated, or who send their kids to private schools, generally have to pay the taxes that support public schools. Limit public school taxes just to the people who have kids in school, and their parents aren't paying taxes anymore; they are paying tuition.

I realize that lots of people feel they have no control over the tax dollars that are pumped into public schools. I'm sympathetic. But that's a political problem, not a philosophical problem. The people own, and pay for, the schools. It's up to the people to create a public school system that best meets the needs of the students who attend them.

UPDATE: This post doesn't say much about whether vouchers produce actual results because I don't know much about that. But here's a pretty strong case that they don't work.

Thursday talk radio update

Dennis Miller (sorry, Dave) was making the case for waterboarding. O'Reilly has been doing the same thing lately.

I have yet to hear either acknowledge a fundamental problem with their position: Waterboarding is torture (the author of the linked post, Marty Lederman, is now deputy assistant attorney general in Obama's Office of Legal Counsel, so his opinion carries weight). As such, waterboarding violates U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions, not to mention our national ethos.

Of course, we could change U.S. law to endorse torture if we wanted to. George Washington would spin in his grave if we did that, but he's probably used to spinning by now. But do we really want to repudiate the Geneva Conventions? Bad idea.

Not only that, failing to prosecute those who authorized waterboarding also is a bad idea. I'm as queasy as the next guy about devoting a lot of time and energy to running down crimes of the previous administration, but we really have no ethical alternative. Either nobody is above the law, or some people are. And if some people are, then this isn't America anymore.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan weighs in and adds a great quote from "A Man for All Seasons."

New blog

The Big Sky Institute at Montana State University has started a new blog on climate change and other environmental issues.

R.I.P.

Just back from Bev Gray's funeral, which was good, as those things go, I suppose. It was a bit too religious for this agnostic's tastes, but it is a relief in a way how religious people seem to have it all figured out and go about dealing with death in such a predictable, comfortable fashion. We agnostics just flail about feeling miserable.

I didn't think that I would know any of the hymns, but it turned out that I did; it's just that the words had changed. Same for the Scripture readings. I understand that the King James Bible doesn't cut it for serious scholarship anymore, but it still makes a fine accompaniment to the grave. "I walk through the darkest valley" can't hold even a feeble candle to "I walk through the valley of the shadow of death." And "I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long" is scant consolation to someone who grew up expecting to dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Bev, who knew the language, would have appreciated the difference.

Enough quibbles. It was a fitting sendoff to a fine woman. But I got a bit of a shock when I put on my sports coat to go the funeral. In the left pocket was the program from the last funeral I attended, that of Paul Russell Brown just over a year ago.

When today's service ended, I put Bev's program in the same pocket. With luck, I thought, the pocket will one day be filled with death notices of all of those dear to me. With less luck, somebody else will have to empty the pocket so I can be buried in that coat.

A bitter thought. I think I had better pull out my King James.

Gazette redesign

The new design of The Billings Gazette, unveiled this morning, makes the word "broadsheet" obsolete. The term used to distinguish standard dailies from tabloid-sized newspapers, such as the Outpost. But the width of the Gazette has now shrunk to the same width as The Outpost. The only difference is that the Gazette page is a few inches longer. Guess they could call it the "longsheet."

In a column announcing the change, Gazette Editor Steve Prosinski says the narrower format "is becoming the industry standard as newspapers strive to control newsprint costs."

Of course, a narrower page does not in itself save newsprint. To do that, you have to not only have narrower pages but print the same number, or fewer, of them every day. Narrower pages do two things: They allow newspapers to print the same number of pages and perpetuate the illusion that nothing has changed. They also make ads smaller.

Notice, for example, that the Outpost is laid out in a four-column format. A two-column ad in the Outpost is nearly five inches wide. But when the Gazette changed to our width, it stuck with the old six-column format (the same as Outpost classified ads). So a two-column ad, which already was narrower than one in the Outpost, shrinks to about three and a quarter inches. Chances are, prices didn't drop to match.

I'm not indifferent to the Gazette's problem. Times are tough for newspapers -- us, too. I saw an old Gazette buddy over the weekend and told him that I have worked for three newspaper chains. The first two are no longer in the newspaper business, and my goal, I've often said, is to outlast the third. Right now, I'd say we're about neck and neck.

Mystery posts

Over at Electric City Weblog, Rob Natelson makes a couple of mystery posts. One notes that the Obamas are sending their children to an exclusive private school. Why? "Because they care about their own kids enough to find them the best school — even if they don’t care enough about your kids to let you do the same."

What the? Guess I missed the speech where Obama said that people rich enough to afford it should not be allowed to send their kids to exclusive private schools. One of the commenters says that Sidwell costs $29,000 a year. So now Natelson, the small government guy, wants the government to come up with the money to send every American child to the equivalent of Sidwell? Bizarre.

Then he has a post explaining why he's glad newspapers are in trouble, a point he makes with a list of stories in Sunday's Missoulian that allegedly indicate liberal bias.

Just imagine: two stories, and a photo, about the guy who will become president on Tuesday (never would have happened if a Republican had been elected).

And a story about a medical marijuana bill. Wait a minute, I thought conservatives were supposed to be in favor of the individuals' right to make decisions about their own medical treatment. How'd that story slip in?

Then a story about a Martin Luther King Day Jr. celebration. So now conservatives hate civil rights, too?

And a story that "glorifies" conservation easements. No real conservative favors conservation.

A Mike Dennison column "pushing" more government health care. Read it for yourself: I don't see Dennison pushing much of anything.

An editorial praising Jon Tester -- praising a Democrat counts as liberal bias, I suppose. Except that Tester was praised for (1.) Working to help veterans (2.) Opposing banking and auto bailouts and (3.) Demanding openness in government. A conservative nightmare!

Editorial page references to George Bush's "hubris" and in favor of allowing homosexual marriage. And just imagine: Liberals in Missoula writing letters to the editor. There is no justice.

For this, newspapers should die? Couldn't bloggers be sacrificed instead?

Thursday talk radio update

NPR had the Eric Holder hearing for attorney general on for most of the day, so that's what I listened to. It was an impressive showing, especially compared to the incredibly lame appearances that Alberto Gonzales made when he held the same job. It's a cliche, I know, but it was a showing that helped reinforce the idea that adults really are going to be in charge again.

NPR reporters, and most everybody else, it seemed, thought the most significant thing Holder said was that waterboarding is torture. Hannity, of course, missed that detail. All he heard was that Holder failed to stop the Marc Rich pardon and that he helped pardon terrorists. It isn't so much that Hannity defends torture as that, at least when I listen, he doesn't seem to even know it's an issue.

Intensive care

Bad news. Outpost columnist and longtime newsman Roger Clawson had a severe heart attack and apparent stroke last night. He is in the hospital (I stupidly forgot to ask which one) but apparently cannot receive visitors. The prognosis is uncertain.

In unrelated bad news, Bev Gray, a colleague of mine from the Academic Support Center at MSU Billings, died yesterday. We heard on Tuesday that she was out this semester because of ill health. We didn't realize how ill her health was. She was a superb writing tutor, meticulous, thoughtful and kind, and a pleasure to work with.

Rotten day all around.

UPDATE: Not much new to report. As of Friday afternoon, Roger was still in intensive care, somewhat responsive. Still don't know much about the long-term outlook.

UPDATE 2: Better news. Roger is out of intensive care at Billings Clinic. Gary Svee says: "He has a hard time talking. Apparently he has a sore throat from all the tubes they put there in ICU. But he can talk, and he can hear, and he can even tell jokes." No surgery is planned, but considerable rehab may be required.

Perhaps he will be back to annoying Eric sooner than we imagined.

UPDATE 3: Roger is supposed to get out of the hospital today (Saturday, Jan. 24).

Billings brand

The Brand Billings Campaign unveiled its new slogan and logo today. My perennial question on such campaigns: Do they ever matter?

The newsroom staff at the first paper I worked for once wasted the better part of an afternoon trying to improve on the city's slogan, which appeared right under our flag on each issue. It was "Hub of the Trinity Valley." Not terribly memorable, but we couldn't improve on it.

Somehow, branding efforts for cities every since always have struck me as roughly equally futile. How many city slogans can you even name? And how much do they influence what you think about the city they are applied to? Not much, I would guess.

NSF

I guess I'm a dunce for not knowing this, but I just read in a Bretton Woods Inc. report that if you write a stack of checks that overdraw your account, banks routinely pay the biggest checks first to ensure that you will be assessed the highest fees possible for overdrawing your account. That's one reason why fees that banks and credit unions make on bad checks have increased 130 percent in the last five years.

Why bother to steal when you can beat up your customers legally?

Gazette layoffs

I am reliably informed that more layoffs have taken place in The Billings Gazette newsroom and that even more layoffs may take place today. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: The total is eight.

UPDATE 2: Fans say good-bye to one of the victims.

Coulter vs. Huckabee

I cruised past Mike Huckabee's show on Fox last night and found that he was interviewing Ann Coulter. This struck me as of interest. Huckabee hasn't given me much reason to think he would be a good president, but he seems to be a perfectly decent guy. Coulter is a wicked shrew. So I was interested to see whether he would hold her to account for her outrages.

The first segment went fine. Huckabee played footage of Coulter having a pie thrown at her, then followed with clips of her calling Huckabee "stupid" and misrepresenting his positions on a variety of issues. He was polite but unsparing in his critique of her, and she began to look very uncomfortable.

Second segment, not so good. Huckabee praised Coulter's research and arguments and generally defended her book. He made no apparent connection between the shabby way she treated him with the shabby way she treats everybody she disagrees with. Couldn't he see that that it is all of a piece?

Coulter's various offenses against truth have been richly documented, for example, here, here and here. When Huckabee lets her off so easy, he discredits himself.

Thursday talk radio update

Bill O'Reilly spent his first hour on the theme of whether Sarah Palin is the future of the Republican Party. For various reasons, I missed most of this, so I don't know what he concluded.

Palin remains unfathomably popular in certain quarters. Beats me. She lost me as soon as she started lying about the Bridge to Nowhere. Sorry, but when it turns out that a job applicant has exaggerated the first item on the resume, I don't bother to check the second item.

Some argue that Palin simply aroused a liberal media. Maybe there is something to that, but I'm dubious. She never sounded all that conservative to me. She favored a windfall profits tax, exposed corruption in the Republican Party, hired a lobbyist to fish for federal handouts and made noises about abortion that sounded far more conciliatory than her official position. She certainly never offended any of my liberal sensibilities, but, then, my sensibilities aren't all that sensitive.

The media scrutiny she drew was a perfectly natural reaction to her relative obscurity, the brevity of her record and some obvious smoke clouds in her background. The fact that she didn't stand up too brilliantly to the scrutiny she received just invited more scrutiny.

At a more personal level, her rhetoric left me cold. People just didn't want to hear the argument any more that some Americans are more American than the rest of us. Barack Obama's strength was his ability to make voters feel like we are all in this together; Palin sent a message that only a few are worthy. Not surprisingly, only a few voted for that position.

So maybe she will resurface in 2012. But not for long, I suspect.

Hannity devoted a couple of hours to:

1. Attacking Obama for scaring us all to death about the economy.

2. Scaring us all to death about how Obama will end the free market economy in America.

What would Hannity have us do instead of Obama's plan? Interestingly, the nearest thing I heard to an answer was a suggestion that the federal government should simply stop collecting income tax for a year. Since Hannity always argues that cutting taxes increases revenues, he presumably believes that removing taxes altogether would bring in infinite revenues. It's a great plan. We could balance the budget, pay off the national debt, put everybody back to work and never have to pay a nickel in taxes. Sometimes, his genius goes unrecognized.

Hard as it may be to believe, Hannity actually made more sense on this topic than Glenn Beck did. Beck's point was that -- well, I'm not sure exactly what his point was. He seemed to be saying that Obama was wrong for wanting to spend so much money, and wrong for not spending money on large enough projects, such as building huge dams and atomic bombs. He seemed to confuse the New Deal with World War II for a while -- he may think that World War II was the New Deal -- and there was something in there about building a lifeboat large enough to hold 300 million people.

That would be a project big enough, presumably, to meet Beck's requirements for sufficient scale, and I don't know why Obama hasn't thought of it yet. It would be one way to fight global warming. Dibs on the bow seat.

I should mention that "To the Point" was on the economy, too, but in typical liberal style it actually used facts and figures to make its points. Here was a stunner (given here from memory but close enough, I think): Americans historically have spent 70 percent to 80 percent of their income each year and saved the rest. In recent years, they have spent 120 percent of their yearly income, fueling the consumer economy with debt. But since the big financial crash, Americans have been spending only 52 percent of their incomes. The problem would not appear to be (at least not yet) that we have too little money in our pockets, which makes Hannity's solution even more suspect. The problem is that we are afraid to spend it.

Another stunning figure was that banks are sitting on some $800 billion in a certain type of reserve whose name I have forgotten but which the analyst described as banks' equivalent of petty cash. Typically, he said, banks keep only a few billion around in those reserves. So banks are sitting on a ton of money that they can't, or won't lend -- and some of that is money from the $700 billion bailout.

If Obama didn't scare you, maybe the facts will.

Solon, farewell

In his column this week (available soon at www.billingsnews.com; keep checking back!), Roger Clawson noodles a bit about the term "solon." He writes that his favorite use of the term was in a story that said, “Solons Loom!”

Presumably, Mr. Clawson never read the Palestine (Texas) Herald-Press during the 1980s, when a promising young editor wrote an entire editorial about the end of the Texas legislative session just so he could print this headline: "Solons, it's been good to know you."

This is, of course, the same Herald-Press that once printed this immortal headline: "County rain falls 12 inches short." And the same Herald-Press that had a wall lined with fractured headlines that included what is still my all-time favorite sports headline, above a story about a basketball game between two parochial schools: "Christ the King raps Crusaders."

Not so dumb

Left in the West responds to my post about Susan Jacoby's book. I would have added my comments there, but apparently I am too dumb to figure out how to do that. Fortunately, I can still blog here like a real person.

I came close to touching on the point Matt makes in my initial post but decided it probably wasn't necessary. Perhaps it was. I would agree that knowing who all of the Supreme Court justices are isn't necessarily a high priority for most voters, but it does seem that anyone who is simply swimming in the sea of news that surrounds presidential elections would have ingested the name of a justice or two. Arguably, appointing justices is one of the president's most important powers, and it's a bit troublesome that so many people seem not to take that aspect of the job even into consideration. It's even more troubling that so many don't even know what the Supreme Court does. People with these levels of ignorance aren't simply making Supreme Court appointments a low priority in their evaluation of candidates; they have no clue that it even matters.

I would make a stronger case about finding Iraq on a map. Responsible citizens are obligated to consider the merits of wars in which this country engages. Not knowing where Iraq is -- or even why it matters where Iraq is -- is a fundamental disqualification. It it even possible to have an opinion about a war with no knowledge of the terrain over which it is fought?

No big deal

At the end of "No Country for Old Men," the new widow, just back from burying her mother, tells the man who has come to kill her that she can't pay the bill for the funeral.

"I wouldn't worry about it," he says. We soon see him walking out the front door, checking his boots for blood.

So you've heard all of the talk about economic collapse and depression? I wouldn't worry about it.

UPDATE: Amazing footage of what it would look like if Yellowstone blows up. I think that's my house in the lower left corner of the very first shot.

Best and worst

Intelligent Discontent gives picks for the best and worst of the Montana blogosphere in 2008.

I was pleased to see that the Billings Blog made the best list, and Andy Hammond was so proud of making the worst list that he already has an early entry in for 2009.

New year

From a news release, Jon Tester's new year's resolutions:

10. Pray for the success and safety of our troops.
9. Expand and improve Veterans Administration services in Montana and across America.
8. Reach out to Republicans and Democrats alike to work together for our nation.
7. Get tough on Wall Street with common sense regulations.
6. Continue to fight for open, accountable and ethical government.
5. Put Montana at the front of America’s quest for energy independence.
4. Check out the new White House basketball court and show Barack how we set a pick on Big Sandy hardwood.
3. Pass a jobs bill to put folks to work in Montana and across the country building infrastructure that grows our economy.
2. Attend the historic presidential inauguration and work for positive change for America.
1. Spend time with my grandkids in Montana.

Still dumbing down

Finished Susan Jacoby's "The Age of American Unreason" this morning. I was a tad disappointed, in part for reasons that appear to be built into this sort of book: the inevitable tone of a nanny, and the sense that what she considers to be "unreason" is really just believing something that she doesn't. I had much the same reaction to Allan Bloom's less readable "The Closing of the American Mind," although he came at the issue from a very different ideological framework. Still haven't read more than a few pages of Hofstadter's "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," which Jacoby's book attempts to update. I think Hofstadter's book may be sitting on a shelf in the attic, but my own anti-intellectualism has kept me from digging it up so far.

Whatever her book's failings, Jacoby is on solid ground when she raises concerns that Americans are becoming too plain ignorant to govern themselves wisely. After all, we are five years and counting into a war in Iraq, and most Americans still can't find the country on a map. What's worse, many Americans don't think it's important to be able to find Iraq on a map.

Similarly, most Americans can't name a single Supreme Court justice, and most don't know that the court's job is to settle constitutional questions. Pretty scary.

Most Americans don't even read a newspaper every day anymore. Jacoby acknowledges a certain irony in this lament: Newspapers were once far from an elevated way to learn about national affairs, but they are so far above their apparent replacements that their loss could be devastating. (She doesn't think much of the blogosphere, which she finds nasty and mutually self-reinforcing.)

All of which leads me in a roundabout way back to my posts of Dec. 26 and Dec. 29, in which I castigated a conservative talk-show host for spouting unscientific nonsense about global warming. I went a few rounds with an anonymous commenter about this before he (or she) finally concluded: "Actually, I'm open-minded about the issue. I'm willing to be convinced that we need to take strong steps to control greenhouse gases. But I'm skeptical of a lot of reporting on the issue."

Fair enough. And pretty much what I think. Which may have been (or perhaps should have been) my point. So much of what passes for political discourse in this country tends to drive apart people on matters about which they fundamentally agree. The irresponsible rhetoric of people like Bill Cunningham and Sean Hannity keeps us from seeing that we really can work together on important matters.

It's sort of like the "chosen one" rhetoric about Barack Obama that I took such vitriolic exception to before the last election. It wasn't just that the rhetoric was false -- nobody, outside of a wacko or two, really thinks Obama has supernatural powers. What made the rhetoric so offensive was that it functioned as a sort of anti-knowledge. That sort of talk actually made the people who listened to it dumber than they were before they started listening. We don't need to get any dumber.

Then there is this sort of rhetoric in today's Gazette. Unlike global warming or the morality of abortion, the question of whether it's more dangerous to drive with or without a seatbelt really isn't open to debate. It's a settled matter. The Dec. 25 Outpost quoted the Montana Seatbelt Coalition as saying that the failure of some Montanans to wear seatbelts costs every driver in the state $51 a year in higher taxes and health insurance costs. The figure may be debatable, but the premise isn't. The letter writer wants me to pay higher taxes and insurance rates out of consideration for his dumb friend's irrational fear about wearing seatbelts.

He writes, "I think my friend and I have enough information to make our own decisions." But his friend, we can be sure, couldn't cite a single scrap of information, outside of perhaps a few anecdotes, to bolster his case. The evidence just doesn't exist.

And Jacoby's argument resounds: Some of us don't know enough to make decisions about how to govern ourselves.

UPDATE: Think you know where Iraq is? Prove it.

Lee faces delisting

More bad news for Lee Enterprises.

BCS BS

I like college football but don't follow it much, so I've been fairly agnostic about the longstanding debate over college football playoffs. I did think it was unfair of Obama to disclose that he favors a playoff only after he was elected; this is information I wanted before I cast my vote.

Because fundamentally I'm against playoffs. The season is too long anyway, and even football players should have to worry about their studies sometime. Besides, college football is too disparate -- lots of teams from lots of schools of vastly different athletic and academic aspirations -- for a playoff to mean much. That's the beauty of college football, and trying to make it more like pro football, where all the teams look the same except for team colors and where everything -- the draft, the schedule, the conferences -- is designed to produce a champion simply demeans the college sport.

Still, no big deal. But I do like to watch football on New Year's Day, and it was dispiriting to find only four games on the holiday schedule. Four games? That's not enough to get to the afternoon snack. And none of the games I cared about were played. Texas Tech (in matters football, I'm still a Texan) plays in the Cotton Bowl today, Texas doesn't play until Monday, and the ostensible championship game is still a week away -- all on working days.

So I settled down for just one game, Clemson vs. Nebraska (luckily, probably the best game of the day), then we watched "Them," a 1954 movie about giant radioactive ants. The wise scientist says at the end, Who knows what mankind may have unleashed when it unlocked the secrets of the Atomic Age?

Moviegoers first heard that line in the last year that Rice University won the Cotton Bowl, back when teams in the old Southwest Conference battled it out for one final game on Jan. 1. The season ended then, but the debate over who had the best team in the country went on until spring training. Those were better days.

No fiesta

It's a good thing I know how to make tamales. Sad news on the culinary front: Two of my favorite Mexican restaurants in Billings, Lolita's and Mamacita's, are closing.

Mamamcita's had an especially warm place in my heart (and belly). The basic Mamacita's combo plate (taco, tamale, enchilada, chili verde, rice, beans, tortilla, served with two sauces, one red and one green) was the best in town and one of the best I have ever had. As in all great Mexican combos, you couldn't take away any part without damaging the whole. It was the concert of flavors, all enhanced by the delicious sauces, that made the special so special.

Mitigating news: The Corral, recently opened on Southgate Drive, has pretty darn good Mexican food and now serves Mexican breakfasts on weekends. In my most-quoted line of prose (quoted only by me, so far as I know, but quoted often), I once wrote that all human endeavors are flawed, with the possible exceptions of Shakespeare's 73rd sonnet and the migas plate at Dos Hermanos restaurant in Bryan, Texas. No migas at the Corral, but good food.

Further mitigation news: The other night we tried out Cafe Italia, Mike Schaer's new venture into Italian cooking. Nice atmosphere, excellent food, not too pricey. Another success for a guy who never seems to make any mistakes downtown. Of course, he is a loyal Outpost advertiser, so you may think I am biased, and I am. But I'm also right.

Irrational warming

In my post below on Bill Cunningham's irrational arguments about global warming, a commenter responds, "Maybe he's been listening to all those liberals who claim that every example of an extreme weather event -- hurricanes, floods, drougts etc. -- are evidence of global warming, as though they never happened before before they came up with their theories."

This points to a different sort of rational error -- one that most scientists (if not all liberals) have been fairly scrupulous about avoiding, at least so far as I can tell. The deal is that some global warming scenarios forecast an increase in extreme weather events. The catch is that no one can say for sure what caused any one event.

Suppose, for example, that I have a .300 hitter in the middle of my lineup, and you have a .250 hitter. Over the course of a hundred trips to the plate, my hitter will get about five more hits than yours will. That's not a lot of hits, and nobody can tell which five hits they are going to be. They might be meaningless pop singles in the late innings of lopsided games, or they might be screaming liners with the score tied and the bases loaded.

But despite the fact that nobody can identify which hits make my hitter better than yours, everybody agrees that, other things being equal, or at least random, a lineup of .300 hitters will beat a lineup of .250 hitters every single season.

The global warming theory works the same way. We may never be able to blame any specific weather event on global warming, but that doesn't mean the threat isn't real. And if you don't buy that, then I have a .250 hitter I would like to trade you.

Tamale day

We acted out my favorite holiday tradition on Sunday: a long afternoon of preparing, building and steaming tamales for an evening meal that couldn't be beat. Tamales and Christmas just go together, not just because they are a welcome change of pace from the usual holiday fare but also because it helps to have a load of family around to assist in the labor-intensive parts of the operation.

We started by baking the pork with onion and bay leaves for 90 minutes or so the night before. Sunday afternoon, we browned the meat with flour and then simmered it with chili powder, cumin, oregano and broth for 40 minutes or so. Meanwhile, I mixed up the masa with oil, water, chili powder and salt, and we soaked the corn shucks in water to soften and clean them.

Tamale assembly is the sociable part of the ritual, a pleasant pastime of spreading masa on a shuck, ladling meat onto the masa and then rolling the whole mess into a cylinder, folding it over to keep it together. We sit around the table to do this, comparing notes on various assembly methods and rooting out the largest shucks. Then, 90 minutes of steaming while various side dishes are prepared - rice, beans, hurricane gravy. Finally, good ol' eating, accompanied by Bayern Doppelbock.

After taking on a full complement of tamales, my daughter and I dashed off to see "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." When we got back home, the house still smelled of cumin and onions. Mmmmm. So we polished off a couple of cold tamales before heading to bed.

That's my idea of a holiday.

Friday talk radio update

Dave Rye was at it again today, saying that liberals think they are smarter than everybody else. Funny thing was, I had just been thinking about how stupid conservatives are. Well, not conservatives in general, or conservatism as a political philosophy, but one particular conservative.

That person is Billy Cunningham, who has a nationally syndicated talk show on Sunday nights. Last weekend, he was using the cold spell as an argument that global warming is a hoax. With every call he took from around this great country, he was asking, So how's global warming in Wisconsin (or Tampa, or Chicago or Idaho). At one point, he said that the cold weather was the final refutation of the global warming theory.

Now, it doesn't matter what your position is on global warming; you have to know that this is utter nonsense. Global warming does not repeal weather. Even Billy Cunningham probably would agree that if we reached a point where we no longer had snow or freezing weather in North America, then it probably would be time to start worrying. In reality, of course, it would be far too late to start worrying.

Cunningham claims to have a law degree and to have been a successful businessman. Surely he must have enough brain cells to know that he was spouting bilge. If I were to call him next summer, when Montana is sweltering in the 90s, and tell him the heat proves that global warming is a problem, he would immediately shoot down that dumb argument. Yet he never once gave an indication that he was kidding or exaggerating about cold weather, and not one of his listeners called him on it.

So if this is what conservatives think, then they are indeed stupid. Which is close to the point that Susan Jacoby makes in The Age of American Unreason. I have a number of problems with the arguments she makes about fundamentalism and junk science, and may write something about all of that when I have finished the book.

But arguments such as the one Cunningham was making remind me of an argument I have had with myself. To me, for example, it seems obvious that when I am home alone, the telephone is far more likely to ring when I am in the bathroom than otherwise. I have piles of anecdotal evidence for this, and every instinct tells me it is true.

Yet there is a scientific skeptic within me who points out that I never notice when the phone doesn't ring but become irritated when it does, so my perceptions may be skewed. And that my theory fails to include a mechanism that might explain why my phone is more likely to ring when I am in the bathroom.

If I really want to establish that the phone is more likely to ring when I am in the bathroom, I should keep records of when I am in the bathroom and when the phone rings and see if there is any statistical correlation. And if I want to be sure, I should probably bring in an outside investigator with no interest in the outcome -- and perhaps not even any knowledge of the purpose of the study -- to do an independent investigation.

But you know what? I don't really want to know if it's true. I'm happy believing that it is true, and if that makes me a bit irrational, fine. I just have to remember to carry the phone along when I go to the bathroom.

And Billy Cunningham doesn't really want to know if global warming is true. He's happy with whatever evidence points his way and blithely dismisses evidence of any other kind.

The difference is that I know I am being irrational about a matter of no consequence. He is being irrational about a matter that could have extraordinarily grave consequences. So yes, I am smarter than that.

Hung with new rope

With a short weekly calendar, an early deadline and a small news hole, I breezed through production day at the Outpost -- a mere 18 1/2 hours. And that included time to write a column on the demise of newspapers (it should be up on the web in a few hours).

And it just now occurred to me that I forgot to include my snapper ending on the column, so I will put it here:

To some extent, newspapers are killing themselves and don't even seem to know it. The new issue of American Journalism Review has an article about two married journalists with a combined 50 years of experience who were recently laid off by the Missoulian. Pamela J. Podger writes about she and her husband, John Cramer, were both laid off just nine months after moving to Missoula from the Roanoke Times.

"We've always been frugal -- we bought our little fixer-upper house on craigslist and are doing most of the work ourselves," she writes.

Craigslist is, of course, the wildly successful free online classified ad service that contributed to a 17 percent decline in classified ad revenues at Lee Enterprises during the quarter that ended June 29. And Lee Enterprises is, of course, the owner of the Missoulian.

UPDATE: Here's the link.

New literary journal

Some local folks (or folks with local connections) have started a new online journal. I've added a link at right.

Lee in the dumps

Lee Enterprises may be headed for default.

Thursday talk radio update

Long, brutal day. Up by 5:30 a.m., home at 8:30 p.m. The snowy roads weren't so bad, except for the occasional slip, and even the 5 degree cold wasn't so bad, except for loading the early-morning papers. But the combination of it all -- the cold, the dark, the roads, the immensely crowded streets -- made for a tough, miserable day. I sometimes wonder if people would be more inclined to pick up The Outpost if they knew what we go through to get it out there for them. Perhaps not.

Even the radio guys seemed restrained by the weather. Hannity sort of perfunctorily beat up on Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers some more -- a habit he apparently is unable to shake. I flipped over to Limbaugh for a moment during a commercial break and he was arguing that bums should be unionized. This is the sort of material that gave Limbaugh his reputation for having a sense of humor. I could endure only a sentence of it.

Everybody else seemed fairly rational. In fact, three issues came up that I hadn’t thought much about before, and I sorted out my position on all three. It seemed like a vaguely productive way to spend a long, miserable day.

Issue one: Should Caroline Kennedy be appointed to the U.S. Senate?

Initial reaction: Who cares?

Conclusion: Nope. Her resume is too thin. She ought at least to win an election or two first.

Issue two: Should Rick Warren be allowed to give the invocation at Obama’s inauguration?

Initial reaction: Who cares? It’s just a prayer.

Conclusion: Could be another shrewd move on Obama’s part. I think he knows that history is on his side on the gay marriage issue. In 30 or 40 years, my guess is that people will look back on this dispute the same way we look back now on the dispute over interracial marriage: Some people still don’t like it, but it’s really not the government’s business.

The left may be annoyed, but where else is it going to go? Meanwhile, Obama is looking at Warren’s positions on poverty and social justice and thinking, I can work with this guy. Pretty much, I suspect, the way he looked at Jeremiah Wright.

Issue three: A guy named his kid “Adolph Hitler” and tried to have that inscribed on the kid’s birthday cake. Shoprite refused; Wal-Mart said OK. Who was right?

Initial reaction: Who cares? Shoprite is under no obligation to sell cakes it doesn’t want to sell. And the right to give your kid a screwy name doesn’t put the buyer in a protected class, the way he would be if, for instance, Shoprite wouldn’t sell him a cake because he was black or because he was celebrating a Jewish holiday. And Wal-Mart is just trying to make a buck, which is what Wal-Mart’s DNA tells it to do.

Conclusion: The one person in this whole mess who we all agree did nothing wrong is the kid. And he has a dismal life before him. Not only does he have a terrible name, but his parents are apparently loons. And his sister, whose name is Aryan Nation, probably won’t be much help. He will have a lot of tough years ahead of him, and now Shoprite is refusing to decorate his birthday cake because it doesn’t like his name. How cruel is that?

The host – a fill-in for O’Reilly – defended Shoprite, saying that it didn’t want to “mainstream” the father’s behavior. I’m not even sure what that means. The implication appears to be that, unless cake decorators in retail outlets around the nation take a stand, parents everywhere will rush to name their kids after great villains in history. I’ve got news for you, pal: Any parent who names his kid after Hitler has problems a whole lot bigger than finding a cake decorator.

One side note: Apparently the father has in the past tried to get swastikas placed on a cake, and Shoprite refused that, too. Too bad, in a way. The swastika is an ancient and appealing symbol that deserves a far better fate than to be an instant reminder of the Third Reich. When we were kids, our most lurid World War II drawings were mostly an excuse to draw lots of swastikas, not because we were Nazi sympathizers but because we just thought swastikas looked cool, as have many people in many cultures over many generations.

I’m sure the swastika will never be rehabilitated in my lifetime, and probably not in my grandkids’, but it is nice to imagine that memories of Hitler will someday fade so far into the past that the swastika makes a comeback. Just not at some kid’s expense.

Tuesday talk radio update

I swear, I just heard Dave Rye say, "Liberals are more moral than the rest of us, at least in their own minds." Liberals also think they are smarter than conservatives, he went on.

Do liberals actually think that? I thought one of the tenets of liberalism was that people have considerable freedom to set their own moral codes. Pretty hard to believe that and at the same time believe that whatever moral code one person chooses is all that much better than anyone else's.

If what Dave says is typical of how conservatives think, then I guess I would concede that he's right about his second point.

Torture and optimism

Many on the web have noted the remarkable contrast between the attention paid to the Illinois governor's legal problems and the Senate committee report implicating top Bush administration officials in war crimes. The first is almost comically inept; the second is profoundly disturbing. Guess which one makes the news?

So when Cal Thomas worries about American loss of optimism, I have two reactions:

1. I'm not so sure that optimism has waned, at least not in Montana. For now, at least, it seems to me that worry about the plunging economy is almost entirely offset by relief over declining gasoline prices. That won't last, probably, but I have noticed much despair yet, have you?

2. To the extent that Americans are becoming less optimistic, Bush's dismal record on torture may be at least in part to blame. Not that people are going around in sackcloth and ashes over it, but down inside we know that we did something terribly, terribly wrong. If it leads to our comeuppance in the world, we will, regrettably, have earned it.

Higher education

Remember back in November when, after a trying and lengthy campaign, you voted for Errol Galt of Martinsdale, Thelma Baker of Missoula, and John Brenden of Scobey? Slip your mind? Those are Montana's delegates to the Electoral College. They are meeting today in Helena, casting their ballots for John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Book issue

If you haven't been over to look at the Outpost's Christmas book issue, then get to it.

Thursday talk radio update

Glenn Beck went on again about the Fairness Doctrine for longer than I could stand, but at least he did add something unusual to the argument: a scintilla of evidence.

It wasn't entirely clear from Beck's account whether the mayor of Toledo actually wanted the Fairness Doctrine restored -- what he said on radio was that he wanted Congress to look at the "fairness principle" -- but the newspaper account seems pretty clear. So there is at least one high-ranking official in a mid-sized American city who thinks the Fairness Doctrine is a good idea. As Toledo goes, so goes the nation.

If you haven't been keeping up with comments to my last post on this topic, you should scroll down a bit and take a look. Mark Tokarski, in particular, has some thoughtful things to say.

I have to admit that, given right-wing radio hosts' relentlessly wrong approach to just about everything in recent years, their shrill opposition to the Fairness Doctrine is beginning to make me think that maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea. One particular annoyance is the repeated insistence by Beck, Hannity, etc., that restoring the Fairness Doctrine would silence my voice.

How's that? I have absolutely no voice in right-wing radio. Limbaugh openly acknowledges that the calls he takes are specifically designed to reinforce his points. Beck is too clownish to handle a serious call. Savage is insane. Hannity will take calls from people who hold opposing views, but he repeatedly cuts them off, mocks them and distorts their arguments. The only power I have over any of those shows is to simply not listen to them in hopes that sagging ratings will drive them away. I don't think that's exactly what the founding fathers had in mind.

I still think that restoring any sort of Fairness Doctrine with strict equal-time provisions would be a bad idea. But I don't see what's wrong with being able to go to the FCC at license renewal time and arguing that KBLG and KBUL, by flooding the airwaves with conservative talk with virtually no alternative voices, aren't serving the public interest. And that Billings would be better served if the FCC would award those licenses instead to, for example, me.

Meth on ice

Do those scary Montana Meth Project ads really work? Maybe not.

UPDATE: OK, so I'm behind the curve again. Intelligent Discontent already has several posts on this topic.

The spam of the day ...

... starts this way: "I am Ming Yang,i have an obscured busines suggestion for you."

Thursday talk radio update

Hannity kept reminding me that jobs are created by private enterprise and all government does is get in the way. Government is the problem, not the solution, he was saying.

No doubt that is why Somalia, with practically no government at all, is thriving.

Reviving the Fairness Doctrine

Alleged liberal efforts to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine continue to get play on talk radio. The Media Research Center has launched a campaign against it, and now George Will, of all people, weighs in.

All very interesting stuff, except for the fact that no serious effort to revive the doctrine appears to exist. Even the Media Research Center's case that liberals are out to revive the doctrine appears awfully weak. Note that the most compelling piece of evidence (the lede paragraph) turns out in the end to be totally erroneous. The rest of the argument draws on quotes that are old, ambiguous (Schumer is simply being factually accurate when he says that some of the same people who oppose government involvement in political speech want the government to limit other types of speech), or come from people who aren't exactly cutting-edge political figures.

It's easy to dismiss this stuff from right-wing radio, which was soundly repudiated at every turn by voters and hopes to at least gain a win in a battle against no detectable opponent. But Will usually comes from the sensible side. Does he know of a push to reinstate the doctrine that isn't obvious anywhere else? And if so, why didn't he use a paragraph or two of his column to tell us what that evidence is?

UPDATE: For the short version of this discussion, go here.

A test of principles

In response to my distaste for early-morning Black Friday shopping, a commenter asks whether I would turn down on principle an ad from a retailer proclaiming an early-morning sale. The major chain retailers who specialize in such sales rarely advertise with local independents like us, but if they did, my answer would be, "Of course we'll take the ad." Just because I'm trying to talk the world into being a certain way doesn't mean I want to stop other people from trying to talk the world into being some other way. And they are welcome to pay me to get their message out.

A sterner test of principles came just last week. As reported here earlier, Town Pump has contracted with Lee Enterprises to control distribution of free publications in its stores. That contract, which went into effect today, is too rich for our blood, so you will no longer find the Outpost in any Town Pump locations.

As noted in the earlier post, Town Pump's decision does not mean that it won't continue to try to get free publicity from The Outpost for its various events. Just last week, in the very first issue that didn't go to Town Pump stores, we had a news release from the company about its charitable efforts.

Nice deal for the Town Pump people. We donate free space in the newspaper so they can tout their own generosity, then they expect us to pay them to distribute that free publicity in their stores. When I first heard that Town Pump had cut a deal with Lee, I thought, I will have to think long and hard before I ever run another free news release for Town Pump.

And I did think long and hard. But I ran it, even though the Town Pump customers it would most likely influence won't see it, at least not at the Town Pump. If any principle underlies this outfit, it's that advertising considerations don't influence news considerations. For the editor in me, that's an easy call. But the publisher in me raised holy hell.

Still, the editor did the right thing. So turn the temperature in Hell down a degree for me, will you?