Has anybody noticed that Bob Brown's proposed clean campaign pledge doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense?

As reported in the GOP E-brief, the pledge reads:

"On television, radio ads, newspaper ads, direct mail, and in phone calls all parties agree not to criticize, attack, condemn or characterize in any way any of their opponents in the 2004 election. Instead, all candidates agree to only use paid communication to highlight their own views on the issues of importance to Montana voters. Issues associated with governing the state of Montana ought to be the focus of this campaign.

"Should any party break the pledge the other party shall be released from the conditions of the pledge."

As I read this, Brown would violate the pledge if he said, "Brian Schweitzer is a fine fellow, and I think he would make an excellent governor." Wouldn't that statement violate the "characterize in any way" provision of the pledge?

Then there's the misplaced "only." As I read the pledge, candidates agree not to say anything about issues of importance unless they are paying to say it. If the pledge said what I suspect Brown meant to say, the "only" would have gone after "communication."

Schweitzer's version makes more sense, but I can't say that I like it much better. I don't think much of clean campaign pledges. They always have a provision canceling the agreement if either party violates it, so all a pledge really means is that the candidates agree to run a clean campaign for as long as they run a clean campaign.

If candidates want to pledge a clean campaign, they should pledge it to themselves, as a matter of conscience; or to God, as a matter of morality; or to the voters, as a matter of honor. The one person to whom no pledge is owed is the opponent.

I wear my cynicism like a cheap coat, so patriotic stirrings are rare. Last week I had two patriotic impulses, and neither was Reagan-related.

The first was familiar and came as I walked out of American Lutheran Church after voting. Happens every time. I always get this vague good feeling about myself and my country and the whole world every time I vote. It's such a good, cheap high that it amazes me that most people don't bother.

The second came as I sat through plank committee meetings at the Democratic convention. I know politics is corrupt and tainted by money and ultimately run by the big boys. But there's something about that grassroots effort, citizens working out their political philosophy with each other, with everybody welcome and everybody getting a chance to speak -- well, it just got to me.

Damn, I love this country.

Pulled an all-nighter getting out the Classified section yesterday and today. No big deal there, but it was the second all-nighter of the week -- and it's only Wednesday. I was at the office for 25 hours straight starting early Sunday morning after covering the Democratic convention most of Friday and Saturday.

And I feel pretty good. My goal is by September to have gotten over this sleep thing altogether. Then I can create my "Sleep is for losers" bumper sticker. Every entrepreneur will want one.

In a comment below, Ed Kemmick wonders why I bother to respond to some of the more idiotic blogger attacks on "mainstream media." It's a good question, especially since I'm not even part of mainstream media, and especially since I quit the mainstream media in part because of the same complaints bloggers have.

Some of it is sheer laziness. Since I keep my own hours, and work a lot of them, I'm always looking for excuses to do things that are vaguely work-related without requiring much actual work. What would you rather do, edit your eighth obit of the day or sound off on some unsuspecting bloggers' website?

Some of it is sheer frustration. I didn't want to educate Mr. Porretto, I wanted to spank him. I know lots of good, honest journalists who have devoted their lives to high-quality, fair reporting and writing. To see some jerk put them down just sets me off sometimes. Maybe if I hadn't devoted so much of my own life to this business, and if I got paid better for it, I wouldn't mind so much.

Still, Ed's right. It's not my job to defend the New York Times. It's a poor use of my time, and it doesn't help the Times. But even as I was thinking that very thought after reading Ed's comment yesterday, I was already firing off another round of comments on yet another website. I'm a hopeless case.

I have at last achieved some notoriety in the blogosphere. Francis W. Porretto has banned me from his blog.

My offense? I was guilty of the rather pedestrian observation that it was dishonest of him to willfully mischaracterize the New York Times obituary of Ronald Reagan as an "undisguised hit piece," then to use that mischaracterization as the basis of an attack on the integrity of the reporter who wrote the obit and on the journalistic profession in general. As it turns out, Mr. Porretto's blog tolerates attacks on the integrity of others but not on his own integrity. That's his prerogative, but isn't it the sort of policy that, if it were adopted by the mainstream media, would be assaulted in the blogosphere as -- dare I say the word? -- arrogant?

Note to Mr. Porretto: To bone up on the meaning of "undisguised hit piece," read this column by Christopher Hitchens. No Mafia hit man ever pulled off a neater job. Mr. Hitchens is unfair and intemperate -- and possibly not even sober; on the one occasion when I heard him speak, he acknowledged that he had fortified himself with a drink or two too many before facing a presumably hostile Texas A&M audience.

But unlike Mr. Porretto, Mr. Hitchens retains his integrity. Not only does he back his accusations with facts and examples (something Mr. Porretto doesn't deign to do) but he willingly battles the aspersions on his integrity that inevitably follow such a piece. On MSNBC, Mr. Hitchens' unrestrained attack on Reagan reduced Joe Scarborough and Ken Adelman to sputtering rage, demonstrating that even a week of national mourning can be relieved by moments of unintentional hilarity.

Democracy in Idaho is officially dead.

Friday is Ronald Reagan Day in Montana, Gov. Judy Martz has proclaimed. So party hearty.

"The passing of President Reagan marks the end of great era in American
history," Gov. Martz stated. "President Reagan made whole an America
that had been fractured by war, Watergate, and economic downturn. He wanted
America to thrive. His eternal optimism and courageous leadership created
hope and promise in a nation that had gone too long without encouragement."

Maybe my memory's going the way of Reagan's, but I don't recall 1980 as such a grim time. 1972 was worse. 1968 was definitely worse. Even 1964 was worse.

1980? We had inflation, of course. And Carter made his infamous "malaise" speech. But the speech didn't prove that malaise existed; in fact, the voters' rejection of Carter demonstrated that they weren't buying that kind of talk. I always took the whole "Morning in America" spiel as just campaign blabber. Maybe I missed it.

Nearly everybody I talked to about the Lee Enterprises poll that showed the Republican gubernatorial primary in a dead heat just a couple of weeks before the election was skeptical. Virtually without exception, people said:

1. Bob Brown would do better than the poll showed.

2. Ken Miller would do better than the poll showed.

3. Pat Davison would do worse than the poll showed.

Guess what? Conventional wisdom was right on all three counts. Of course, none of that proves the poll was wrong. Sentiments can change rapidly right before an election, especially one as negative as this one was. Next time, though, I will pay closer attention to conventional wisdom and less to the polls.

The defeat of the Cobb Field and Heights pool proposals raises this question: Is there any proposal that could pass in this town right now?

Tuesday night's vote was only the latest in a string of bond issue defeats. A new high school was beaten down. Voters rejected a new library. They turned down a cultural mill levy. But there were problems with each of those proposals.

The school district was hurt by the plan to build on the West End, as well as by internal dissension and aftereffects of the stike. The library, I'm convinced, was a worthy proposal, but it wasn't obviously worthy without a fair amount of study, and most people won't study. The cultural mill levy probably looked too much like socialism for this town.

But the baseball bond issue seemed to have everything going for it. Even the proposal's strongest critics seeemed to agree that something had to be done. Bond supporters raised better than $100,000 and spent it wisely. They lined up lots of support from business and nonprofits. They tried to answer every question anybody raised. But again the voters said no.

Here's my question: Did the bond supporters make some simple error that doomed this proposal? Or have we reached a point in Billings where nothing outside of a sewer or a city street will ever get built unless a philanthropist or private enterprise builds it?

If the latter is true, then I fear we are on our way to destroying the system that built 20th century America.

Got back late yesterday from the Butte Press Club's annual meeting. More on that later, but I've got to get a paper out today.

Will Pat Davison ever learn how to run a political campaign? Perhaps, but not in time for this election. His news release on Saturday noting the passing of Ronald Reagan misspelled the former president's name -- three times.

This letter arrived too late to make The Outpost before the election, but it's worth a read:

Just read the "Cobb Field Strikes Out" article [Outpost, May 27]. It brought up a number of "whys" for me also.

Why is it when the city needs something, we can't get what we need, without it being a monument to someone's ego?

We need a better ball park! No question about that. The Mustangs, Scarlets, Royals, fans and yes the city deserve something better.
Why can't we have a new ball park, in the same configuration as we currently have, and not move all the major lighting? Tom Llewlyn made a good point.

Why do we have to have a field eight feet deeper, unless it is to accommodate the underground batting cage? That might be OK if additional seating goes down another eight feet, but expecting people to sit on a grassy hillside, in our Montana sun and/or "rain", come on get real! The stampede to cover will be worse than it currently is.
And why stop with only 4000 "real live" seats. I have seen Downtown Billings Night, and other special nights exceed 4000 many times over the years.
If there are skyboxes, why not have them be part of a roof, or cover, that can extend over the majority of the seats behind home plate like it now does?

Do you think the neighbors are going to like the diagonal (and dangerous if I might add) parking? What do you gain? Two or three spaces on one side of a block?
This also, in essence, makes the diagonal parking street a "One Way Street."
Did anyone consider that the number of vehicles probably will be multiplied with the splash park families in addition to the ball game fans. Will they shut down the splash park during games like they now close the pool? Just picture the number of vehicles backing into traffic after a game. You think there is traffic problems now? Just wait.

Speaking of parking. Why does the parking have to be in the back of the outfield instead of closer to the ticket booths and front gate? It will be almost a "two block walk" from the center of the proposed parking area, as illustrated, to the ticket booth and front gate. Why not take a note from the Metra handicapped parking and ticket booths? With the field in the same approximate position, and if the splash park was on the Northwest corner, the parking could be where it is now and extend up N. 27th Street for one-quarter to one-half block. Why not make it as easy as possible for your customers to do business with you? We "seasoned citizens" would appreciate a little consideration in the parking. Most of us don't have the young legs and/or the wind that young survey takers and planners of ball parks have.

The "plaza" looks nice, but serves little or no useful purpose. Are trees mandatory? Put them in some parking dividers and let the rest of the area be for vehicles.

I agree, the new ball park idea is great. I also agree, the proposed plan, as advertised, needs work.

Mustangs start June 18. Lets all go out to the ball game.

Harold Kelso
Billings

In the weekly Montana Green Party Bulletin, Paul Stephens is upset about a Lee Newspapers poll that asked opinions on a Schweitzer vs. Brown and Schweitzer vs. Davison gubernatorial matchup but not on a Vincent vs. Brown or Davison matchup.

He writes:

"Like all polls based on commercial media "spin" and advertising, it is necessary that the polls reflect the amount of money spent on advertising. Because Schweitzer has raised and is spending about 20 times what Vincent has, he is clearly the "frontrunner" and must win the primary election. If he didn't, and wasn't portrayed in this light, why would any candidate want to pay the same commercial media which commissions and publicizes the polls?

"So it is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. And the media can make sure it happens by not even considering how the better Democrat might do against the Republicans. For all we know, Vincent might beat both Republicans by a larger margin than Schweitzer. And we have no idea what will happen when
the Republicans start in on Schweitzer's career in Saudi Arabia, and the fact that he has made a fortune, indirectly, from the same oil imperialism which is killing American soldiers on a daily basis. He might end up with 20% of the vote, whereas Vincent, probably the best-prepared governor
candidate we have ever had, would easily win against any Republican if people knew who he is and what he stands for. But the corporate media will heavily bias their coverage of his campaign for the simple reason that he isn't paying them enough to help their bottom line."

I'm not quite sure how this meshes with the Gazette's endorsement of Vincent.

What should the tax rate on rich people be during time of war? Would you believe 100 percent?

Still trying to decide who should be governor? Here's your instant voters' guide:

You should vote for Bob Brown if you think government should be run by people who have devoted their lives to it.

You should vote for Pat Davison if you think the absolute worst thing that anybody could ever do to you is raise your taxes.

You should vote for Ken Miller if you think that governors should look as much like Abraham Lincoln as possible.

You should vote for John Vincent if you think Democrats have had the right answers all along.

You should vote for Brian Schweitzer if think the second-best choice for governor is a Republican.

You should vote for Tom Keating if you think that 19th-century solutions will solve 21st-century problems.

You should vote for Stan Jones if you think that libertarian ideology trumps competence and experience.

You should vote for Bob Kelleher if you think the Revolutionary War was a bad idea.

This commentary on the new Pew Research Center poll on journalists is well worth reading. The discussion I've read in the blogosphere (for example, here) has nearly all focused on the liberal vs. conservative aspects of the poll. The blogosphere's fascination with this feature of mainstream journalism continues to astonish me. The poll covers vital issues with broad implications for the health of American democracy: the extent to which the media are influenced by bottom-line pressures, concerns over quality, concerns over the relationship between journalists and readers, the general sense that journalism is headed in the wrong direction. Yet all anybody wants to talk about is the liberal vs. conservative divide. I don't get it.

I suspect the public's growing distrust of journalists also influences journalists' growing distrust of the public. If the public thinks I'm corrupt and incompetent, and I know I'm not, then the public has no clue, does it? It becomes a self-reinforcing -- and widening -- divide.

The highlight of my Memorial Day was watching the national lacrosse championship game on ESPN. Syracuse held off Navy, 14-13, in what was the most thrilling sports event I have seen in years. Even my wife got caught up in it, and, trust me, that almost never happens.

Since it was Memorial Day, I think everybody was sort of rooting for Navy, which had a Cinderella year and had several players preparing for active duty practically as soon as the game ended. A half-time feature showed a former player who lost both legs in the war. But Syracuse was a worthy champion, with a proud lacrosse history and one of the best players in the business in Mike Powell.

What amazed me was that the game drew 44,000 people (mostly Navy fans) to the Baltimore Ravens stadium. 44,000! I always thought I could be a lacrosse fan if I got the chance, but I have rarely even seen a game, much less had a chance to play. It's a sport with the contact of rugby, the teamwork of basketball, the speed (almost) of hockey and the grace of throwing and catching that distinguishes baseball. And it's an authentic American game. You can't beat it.

In response to comments to the post below:

Craig, Ayn Rand is indeed tempting but, as you indicate, probably too much to take on, both for the class and for me. Thanks for the suggestion.

Eric, Thurber is wonderful but probably doesn't fit. He did, however, have one of my all-time favorite lines about the working life: "There is, of course, a certain amount of drudgery in newspaper work, just as there is in teaching classes, tunnelling into a bank, or being President of the United States. I suppose that even the most pleasurable of imaginable occupations, that of batting baseballs through the windows of the RCA Building, would pall a little as the days ran on." Perhaps "The Catbird Seat" would work?

JR, I have operated my own business for seven years. Contempt? No way. But I do think a certain contempt for business runs through the literary crowd -- probably because writers are so often underpaid. As my post indicated, I would welcome suggestions on material that gives a more positive view. Got any?

I will be teaching a freshman comp course at Rocky this fall in conjunction with an introductory business course. This means, for one thing, that this site probably will go dormant again for a while. More significantly, it means I am in the market for ideas to marry the two courses.

One possible avenue is a literary approach to business. Possible titles that have occurred to me, or that have been suggested to me, include:

Babbitt
Death of a Salesman
Liar's Poker
Bartleby the Scrivener (a must!)
an essay by Thoreau
Studs Terkel's "Working"
The Jungle
Dead Souls
Barbarians at the Gate

Any thoughts? I can't think of much literature that takes a positive view of business, but I may be overlooking something.

Jan Falstad's column today reminded me of the time at the Gazette when I was assigned to write a story about a Qwest public affairs officer who was retiring. Turned out that he had no listed phone number with the company.

Get that. The guy who's in charge of telling people about the phone company can't be reached by telephone. Even the propaganda ministry in the Soviet Union would have been impressed by that lock-tight grip on information.

The Missoula Independent has a long piece on the private prison in Shelby. The story doesn't break much new ground -- I suspect the reporter was hoping to find something that wasn't there -- but it does shed light on the paradox of private prisons.

I'm ag'in private prisons for two reasons:

1. The power to hold people under lock and key is among the most awesome powers any human can hold over another. Just as a matter of principle, people who hold that power ought to be held to the strictest possible standards and should be accountable directly to the people. It doesn't take an Abu Ghraib to understand what can go wrong in a poorly run prison.

2. The thing that makes free enterprise so great at grilling burgers and cranking out toasters is that the incentives are right. Businesses that mistreat customers and employees wind up with no customers and no employees. Free enterprise rewards good work. In a private prison, as the Indy points out, the incentives are all wrong: The customers (prisoners) can't opt out, and in a place like Shelby, it can be pretty tough for the employees (the guards) to opt out, too.

Moreover, it's in the stockholders' best interest to have more people serving longer sentences with less rehabilitation and less supervision. Prison is the one place where the most satisfied customers are the ones who are least likely to return.

The only way to keep these perverse incentives from doing real harm is by strict government control. And if you have to pay for that, why have private prisons at all?

UPDATE: In his comment below, JR seems to have missed the entire point of my post. Perhaps I wasn't clear, or perhaps he is being deliberately obtuse.

In the first place, agriculture is, of course, a heavily subsidized industry, from price supports to disaster payments to guaranteed loans to food inspections to government-mandated marketing, even to the farm-to-market roads that crisscross the country and that no private company would ever have dreamed of building.

Second, to the extent that it is allowed to, free enterprise works in agriculture because, again, the incentives are right. Producers who grow bigger and better crops sell them more successfully. Nobody has to tell anybody what to do, yet everybody wins. Those incentives don't exist in private prisons.

Third, Abu Ghraib is, in fact, a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Evidence is unclear whether private guards behave better or worse than government-employed guards, but what is clear is this: If a private company were accused of doing what government employees have done at Abu Ghraib, it would be stonewalling every step of the way. It would do everything within its considerable power to assure that not one word leaked out, and it would fight subpoenas and grand juries all the way into bankruptcy. Government can try to cover its tracks, too, but never as thoroughly as a private company.

For a truly chilling example of what can happen, read this Harper's piece from August 2003 about Correctional Medical Services, the nation's largest provider of prison medicine. Money quote:

"[P]rivate companies such as CMS feel no responsibility, and have no legal obligation, to account to the public for what goes on inside their facilities. So, while CMS receives about $550 million of taxpayer money each year, the company chooses not to provide any accounting of how that money is spent or even how much of it is spent--and how much unspent, to be pocketed as profit. And although lawsuits over the years have revealed discredited health-care professionals working in CMS facilities, the company refuses to reveal the names of its doctors and nurses for verification or to provide any account of how many have been disciplined or had their licenses revoked in other states. With CMS responsible for so many patients nationwide, it is fair to say that the practice of medicine in prison has reached an unprecedented level of inscrutability--indeed, secrecy."

SECOND UPDATE: Jackie Corr e-mails: Private prisons and what comes with them have no place in a free society. None!

Accountability comes first when it comes to the protection of the rights of all, including prisoners.

As one story after another has pointed out, the prosecution of contractors in the Iraq torture scandal will be much more difficult then if they were legitimate military personnel. It's unclear what laws can be used to prosecute a civilian contract employee.

For example: What we do know is the Justice Department sent Lane McCotter, former director of the Utah Department of Corrections,to Iraq as a "corrections advisor" with a private contract. He was was involved in the running of Abu Ghraib prison during the torture sessions. McCotter has since resigned and is no longer in Iraq.

McCotter was forced out of the Utah prison system in 1997 following the case of a schizophrenic inmate who died shortly after being strapped to a restraining chair for 16 hours. McCotter later became an executive of a private prison company whose Santa Fe, New Mexico jail was investigated by the Justice Department in 2003 for healthcare, sanitary and safety deficiencies. After New Mexico, McCotter showed up in Iraq as a private contractor.

Samizdata's editorial policy spells out its way of dealing with comments: "Samizdata.net editors are God and God moves in mysterious ways. If you have an article, comment, rant or smart-arse rejoinder that you would like to contribute to Samizdata.net, e-mail it to us and we might publish it suitably edited. Or not."

City Lights is having problems with rogue comments again. I am both sympathetic and a tad snarky about the problem. Ed's troubles help assuage my envy when all he does is refer to one of my posts and gets three times as many comments as the actual post does. His troubles also make this piece this piece of virtual real estate feel a bit less lonesome.

From a broader perspective, comments appear to drag down a lot of blogs. Anonymous, unfiltered, uncensored: Comments sound like a great engine of the First Amendment. But they can become so overwhelming that some bloggers, like Instapundit, don't allow them at all, and others, like Roger L. Simon, have so many comments that only the most determined fans ever slog through them all. When readers have to be their own editors, all they can do is either ignore comments, suffer through them all, or sample a random few and hope to catch the wheat rather than the chaff.

There is something to be said for all those elitist, arrogant, mainstream editors pruning letters to the editors at newspapers. It sure saves me, as a reader, a lot of time wading through worthless crap. And people like Ed's nemesis Prof. Hibbs probably never show up on the letters page at all. Now that sounds like a better world.

The Volokh Conspiracy makes a point similar to one of my regular themes: The liberal vs. conservative divide has more to do with culture and partisanship than with actual differences in policies. Well, actually, I am distorting Volokh's views a tad to make them fit with my own. You should probably just go read what he said.

I've become a big fan of watching the British Parliament on C-SPAN. Those guys understand the art of political debate. Watch them go at it for a while, then compare it our pallid imitation of political discourse, and you begin to think that maybe the Revolutionary War wasn't such a hot idea.

Last night I watched Tony Blair answering questions from the House of Commons, weaving paragraph after paragraph of perfectly turned prose, every comma in place. The rhetoric got pretty lively, and Blair took some hard shots from the opposition. Occasionally, the camera would switch from the opponent to Blair as he waited his turn to respond. I expected him to look angry or concerned or at least thoughtful, but instead he was grinning. Clearly, he not only welcomed the public challenge, he positively relished it. You gotta love that. No spinning flak, no prearranged questions, no memorized nonresponses -- just the sheer joy of competing in the public arena. When did American politics stop being fun?

By the way, Blair said one thing that struck me as news, besides the condom protest that did make the news. He was asked whether, after the June 30 turnover of power in Iraq, the Iraqi government would have full sovereignty, including control over prisons and oil fields. Blair said that it absolutely would.

In this country, I have never heard anyone even suggest that the June 30 turnover would be much more than a formality, sort of a glorified student council form of government. Was Blair sandbagging? Does he know more than we do about what will happen? Is some split looming between us and our best ally?

Bad mistake in this week's Outpost. Somehow, the printer picked up two pages from the May 6 issue, putting them where this week's Page 8 and Page 21 should be. The most confusing part for readers will be encountering a page full of a two-week old Calendar of Events. The correct Calendar begins here.

On the other hand, unless I missed it somewhere, this story is a bit of a scoop.

Delivery day used to be my favorite day at The Outpost. Now I think it's the hardest.

For about four years, I delivered 140 stops every Tuesday. I'm slow -- about 14 stops an hour -- so it was a 10-hour day. When we were delivering the Montana Senior News or Lively Times, or had an insert, the day could run to 14 or 15 hours.

I liked it. I got some honest-to-goodness exercise -- in the car, out of the car, in the car and out -- saw the city from Lockwood to Shiloh Road and encountered the customers up close. The phone didn't ring and the computer didn't freeze up. I listened to jazz, railed at Limbaugh, cruised to "All Things Considered." When I was teaching journalism, I polished lectures while driving. When I was teaching German, I sang German songs out loud just to sharpen the tongue.

Usually somewhere around mid-afternoon, I would fall into some sort of easy groove -- pleasantly tired, my mind free from the office, caught up in the endless routine -- stop, count, load the rack, count the spoils, toss them in the back. I felt like I could go on forever. Sometimes it seemed like I did.

Best of all, when the papers were gone, I was done. A couple of tacos, beer on the front porch, dozing on the couch. The working man's reward. The office could wait until tomorrow.

Now my route is about 75 stops. With a Thursday delivery date, we can't wait until 7 or 8 p.m. to get all the papers out, so I can't deliver as many. I never hit that afternoon groove. Instead of an easy lope down the backstretch, I'm kicking for the finish line. I get done between 4 and 5 -- too early for a small businessman to head for the house. I go to the office, tired but not done in, and make a bank deposit, check the e-mail, try to return a phone call or two.

Tonight I have to get subscription renewals out and get payroll done. I'll putter around, waste some time -- what else is blogging for? -- and yearn a bit for when the days were longer but not quite so hard.

Cal Thomas says he didn't see adultery or alcoholism going on when he served in the Army in the mid-1960s. My guess is that Cal didn't get invited out much. In my military stint a few years later, I saw plenty of alcoholism. If adultery came up short, it wasn't for lack of trying.

I would imagine that today's Army is a much straighter outfit that when I served (in fairness to Cal, it was probably a straighter place when he served than when I did, too). But let's not kid ourselves about military service. Drinking and whoring goes back at least as far as the Romans. In Jaroslav Hasek's comic novel of World War I, "The Adventures of Good Soldier Schweik," just about everybody is drunk just about all of the time. The night before he enters the service, if memory serves, Schweik hits 25 bars. "But, mind you, I never had more than two drinks in any of them," he says the next day.

To blame the failings of guards and interrogators in Iraq on the advent of women in the armed services is a stretch. Even the best armies -- and ours is certainly the best that ever existed -- are exceedingly blunt instruments. To ask them to excel at tasks like nation building is asking an awful lot.

This week's Outpost will have a Calendar listing saying that the Lilly Brothers will perform Saturday in Bozeman. Not so. Just got word that the brothers had to cancel for medical reasons. The opening act, Meridian Green (who will perform here on Sunday), will instead play the whole show.

I've been getting lots of copies of this e-mail:

IT HAS BEEN CALCULATED THAT IF EVERYONE IN THE UNITED STATES DID NOT PURCHASE A DROP OF GASOLINE FOR ONE DAY AND ALL AT THE SAME TIME, THE OIL COMPANIES WOULD CHOKE ON THEIR STOCKPILES.

AT THE SAME TIME IT WOULD HIT THE ENTIRE INDUSTRY WITH A NET LOSS OF OVER 4.6 BILLION DOLLARS WHICH AFFECTS THE BOTTOM LINES OF THE OIL COMPANIES

THEREFORE MAY 19TH HAS BEEN FORMALLY DECLARED "STICK IT TO THEM DAY" AND THE PEOPLE OF THIS NATION SHOULD NOT BUY A SINGLE DROP OF GASOLINE THAT DAY.

THE ONLY WAY THIS CAN BE DONE IS IF YOU FORWARD THIS E-MAIL TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS YOU CAN AND AS QUICKLY AS YOU CAN TO GET THE WORD OUT.

WAITING ON THIS ADMIINSTRATION TO STEP IN AND CONTROL THE PRICES IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE REDUCTION AND CONTROL IN PRICES THAT THE ARAB NATIONS PROMISED TWO WEEKS AGO?

REMEMBER ONE THING, NOT ONLY IS THE PRICE OF GASOLINE GOING UP BUT AT THE SAME TIME AIRLINES ARE FORCED TO RAISE THEIR PRICES, TRUCKING COMPANIES ARE FORCED TO RAISE THEIR PRICES WHICH EFFECTS PRICES ON EVERYTHING THAT IS SHIPPED. THINGS LIKE FOOD, CLOTHING, BUILDING MATERIALS, MEDICAL SUPPLIES ETC. WHO PAYS IN THE END? WE DO!

WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE. IF THEY DON'T GET THE MESSAGE AFTER ONE DAY, WE WILL DO IT AGAIN AND AGAIN.

SO DO YOUR PART AND SPREAD THE WORD. FORWARD THIS EMAIL TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW. MARK YOUR CALENDARS AND MAKE MAY 19TH A DAY THAT THE CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES SAY "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH"

How silly is this? Even if the numbers are right, what would it prove? If we're determined to walk for a day, then we shouldn't be shooting ourselves in the foot. Seems to me the only way to cut gasoline prices is to burn less of it. What day you burn it on doesn't matter a bit.

As often happens, Jay Rosen makes more sense than anybody else in the debate about whether mainstream media should have shown graphic images of the Berg beheading.

The odd thing about this discussion is that the terrorists and many war-supporters are on the same side: They both think the beheading video should be widely disseminated. The war bloggers think the video will reinforce American beliefs about the justice of our cause (and divert attention from the prison scandal); the terrorists think, I suppose, that however much Americans may bluster about their commitment to the war, the video will in fact terrify us and discourage private investment in Iraq, which in turn will slow reconstruction and make conditions more favorable for breeding new terrorists.

Which side is right? I have no idea. But it's strange to see the media attacked for hating America because they refuse to give the terrorists what they want by showing the video.

Lots of comments worth reading on the Outpost website about the Cobb Field bond election.

Well, at least nobody's telling me what I can print.

The new issue of Harper's magazine has a long article by a Canadian journalist who spent time with Iraq insurgents in and near Falluja. It's a gripping tale that reminds us of why we never want to know too much about our enemies -- it makes them too hard to kill.

The most touching portrait is of an insurgent who is highly conversant in Western culture, is a stickler for Arabic grammar and is so popular with kids that they head toward his lap whenever they see him. He says he fights Americans not because he admired Saddam (he didn't) nor because he supports Al Qaeda (he doesn't) but because he's angry that Americans are killing Iraqi civilians and because he believes the Koran commands him to repel occupying forces of nonbelievers. Makes it kind of hard to think that official American policy is to kill him.

Seldom Sober (a plausible claim) takes the usual blogosphere swipes at established journalism. Nothing new there. What's interesting are the comments actually defending the press. My favorite:

"Good Lord. Another 'blogs are better than Big Media' post. Someday you'll look back and realize how ridiculous you sounded back in '04.

"You know, they sell little plastic doctor kits at Toys 'R Us, but just because I can buy one and play with it doesn't make me a surgeon."

Over at Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds is rounding up posts arguing that the media are emphasizing the Abu Ghraib story over the Berg beheading because of the hope that the prison story will hurt Bush more. Glenn does this sort of thing a lot, which is painful to see, because he really is a smart guy on a lot of topics. But news judgment isn't one of them. A few quick points:
1. Newspapers (with a few exceptions) didn't show pictures of the beheading out of an old editors' rule: Never make customers throw up their breakfast over the newspaper. It makes the ink run on the classifieds. When everything's available on the internet, maybe the rule has outlived its usefulness, but it's a rule that's been applied pretty uniformly since photography was invented. Pretty hard to blame it on liberal bias.
2. The Berg story, dramatic as it was, was basically a one-day story. When bad guys do bad things, that's news. But that's all it is. The only follow-ups concern vague allegations by the victim's parents and speculation about what the heck Berg was doing over there in the first place. Not very strong stuff. Until, and unless, we catch the guys who did it, there won't be much more to report. The prison story has "legs" (and the photos are more publicly presentable). We will continue to see developments in this story for months to come, and its tentacles are almost certain to spread. Has it been overplayed? I think so. But it's big news and will remain so.
3. The fact that the Berg beheading drove up web traffic does indicate something about public interest in the story. But at least some of the interest is voyeuristic. Newspapers aren't ever going to get that business.
4. One aspect of the prison story actually says something good about newspapers, although they will never get credit for it at Instapundit. In my experience, newspapers pretty consistently play up stories that require some sort of public response. I don't think it really makes much difference which party benefits from the story -- whether its impeachment of a Democrat or prison abuse blamed on a Republican. This habit that newspapers have of writing a lot about stories that require some sort of public decision is precisely the role the Founding Fathers envisioned for the press. And it's a job the press does pretty well.

The Missoula Independent doesn't think much of Brian Schweitzer's performance in the gubernatorial debate. It's not the first hint I've heard from the alternative press that Schweitzer may be losing ground. Vincent's a Democrat's Democrat; in trying to reach out to Republicans, Schweitzer was certain to alienate hardline party members. That's a price he probably could afford to pay. But he needs outfits like the Independent on his side.

Granted, Independent readers probably don't have the greatest voting record. But there are the lot of them, and they are the people Schweitzer's GOP gambit ought to appeal to. This race could get interesting.

I posted some thoughts a week or two ago about journalists and religion. Now Columbia Journalism Review has published a whole article (and a good one) on the topic.

It reminds me of when I was a Southwest Conference sportswriter. That was the Bible Belt, and it was common for athletes interviewed in the lockerroom to credit whatever success they had to the Lord (to their credit, they never blamed God for their dropped passes and penalties for unsportsmanlike conduct). Whenever an interview took this turn, I saw reporters setting their notebooks aside.

It struck me as odd. If a player attributed his success to, say, an eighth-grade coach, or to a change in diet or exercise, that would go right in the paper. But God as an explanation for human achievement was somehow out of bounds. You'd almost think the Supreme Court had ruled that God had no place on athletic fields (at least not those of public schools).

On talk radio yesterday the talk was all about the beheading of an American. Sean Hannity linked to the video and wanted to know, Why won't the elite media show this? Where are the Muslim clerics apologizing for this? The Democrats are politicizing American abuses, but where's the outrage over this? Michael Reagan asked the same questions.

I really must live on another planet. This line of thinking makes absolutely no sense to me. People whom we don't know, over whom we have no authority, and against whom we are waging war, commit an act of ruthless brutality. Therefore ... what? It's OK to brutalize unrelated Iraqis? We should lower our standards to theirs? We should enlist them in the military so we can court martial them? What's a little rape when you've got beheadings going on? Somebody help me out here.

I've been trying to find something positive in the prison abuse scandal, and I thought I had it figured out. But I am disheartened after reading some of the comments here. My positive spin was that there was a lot of loose talk after 9-11 about the merits of torture as a method of eliciting intelligence and even just for the sheer vengeful satisfaction of it.

The pictures from Abu Ghraib prison, I thought, would put an end to that kind of talk. Torture in the abstract is one thing; actually looking at it, even digitally, is something else. Those grim photos seemed to reawaken the fundamental sense of decency and capacity for outrage that is at the heart of civilization. Obviously, however, not everybody got the message.

The real lesson here may be that no outrage emerged until the pictures did. The investigation was announced in January. The Red Cross apparently found problems going back to November. For the last couple of months, Harper's magazine has been printing accounts of prisoners at Guantanamo and of post-9/11 detainees in New York City. Guantanamo prisoners claimed they weren't allowed to pray or move and were subjected to forced injections. New York City detainees -- none of whom was ever even charged with a terrorism-related crime, much less convicted -- complained that their heads were butted into a wall hung with a "These colors don't run" T-shirt. An independent commission found blood on the shirt.

All of this went on with scarcely a public murmur. Much has been made of the fact that digital technology can spread photos around the globe almost instantly. But the converse may be that if there are no pictures, there is no story.

OK, it's a bit strange, but I found this piece on the National Day of Hypocrisy to be interesting and compelling.

I particularly like the reference to Matthew 6:5-6. It's a passage I have used in arguments about the proper role of prayer in public life, but it never gets me anywhere. I'm not sure why. Jesus' message seems to be clear: Prayer is between me and God. When I use prayer to make some larger point about how holy or patriotic you are, or to make political hay about the place of religion in the public square, God stops listening. As Cool Hand Luke says, "I'm just standing in the rain, talking to myself."

This meeting notice won't make The Outpost, so I put it here. You can read more here.

The Custer National Forest, Beartooth District will be hosting a Public
Meeting for the Beartooth Travel Management Proposal in the Big Horn Center
at the Holiday Inn Billings Plaza Hotel and Trade Center at 5500 Midland
Road Billings, Montana on May 11, 2004 at 6:30 pm. This is an information
meeting to discuss why there is a need for the proposal, the National
Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process and to learn how you can become
involved. This is not a hearing on the proposal, no testimonies or
disposition will be heard or given, and nothing will be recorded.

The comment period for the Beartooth Ranger District Travel Management
Proposal is September 1, 2004. We are very interested in receiving your
written comments as they relate to this proposal. This is the first of
several opportunities you will have to participate in the development of
the Travel Management Plan for the Custer National Forest, Beartooth Ranger
District.

The Montana News Association, Donald Cyphers' quirky-to-bizarre daily take on the news, now claims to be the leading online news source in Montana. I heard a radio ad yesterday claiming 4.8 million readers, then found this article confirming the claim, if not the number.

When I heard that Cyphers had 4.8 million readers, then I figured, hey, The Outpost must have 80 million readers. But no, Cyphers ranks us somewhere in the middle of the pack. Dead last? The Billings Gazette, the so-called "source," which claims a scant 18,000 readers. It's "lights out" to Ed Kemmick's blog.

How does the Montana News do it? "The Montana News gives the credit to the Holy Spirit and is walking by the supernatural powers of the Holy Spirit."

It's not fair! The rest of us have to get by on natural powers. The FCC ought to do something.

I have a couple of free tickets to the Kid Rock concert in Bozeman next Tuesday. Holler if you're interested.

Missoula makes the Onion.

Jay Rosen has a thoughtful post (with some less thoughtful comments) about the mini-furor over Ted Koppel's decision to air on "Nightline" the names of soldiers killed in Iraq. To me, as I note on Rosen's site, the amazing thing is that there is controversy at all. Whatever one may think of Koppel's political agenda, if any, the broadcast made only one journalistic statement: These deaths are worthy of notice. That assertion isn't even disputed. Beyond that, this was "just-the-facts" reporting at its purest. It says something about how split this country is when even merely naming war dead becomes a political hot potato.

The GOP E-brief may have something here:

By Phyllis Ward, Lincoln
Could someone please explain why the media prints everything (Montana Environmental Information Center spokesman) Jim Jensen says as the truth when all the reporters would have to do is a little fact checking?

On March 28, the Tribune ran a story about Jensen’s idea of making his cyanide ban a part of the Montana Constitution. According to that story, Jensen said “supporters of the original ban gathered nearly 40,000 signatures in 1998, when they only needed about 20,000 to get a regular initiative on the ballot.”

A quick call to the Secretary of State’s office reveals there were 26,466 signatures gathered for I-137, the 1998 ban. That means Jensen exaggerated by about 12,000 people.

According to a story in the March 27 Helena Independent Record, “Asked where his group’s money is coming from, Jensen said backers have not yet started fund-raising.” Yet on March 4 – three weeks earlier – Jensen himself sent a fund-raising letter saying “Make a special financial contribution to help us fight to keep I-137 intact.”

A Pat Davison news release and radio commercial says that Bob Brown got the second-worst rating for a GOP senator from the Montana Chamber of Commerce in 1991. He had the worst rating for a GOP senator in 1987.

Now that's the best reason I've heard yet to vote for Bob Brown.

This arrived too late for The Outpost, but they asked that it go online, so here it is:

The Billings Police Department Crime Prevention Center and Retired Senior Volunteer Program (RSVP) invites seniors, 55 years and older, to a McGruff House information session on Wednesday, May 5, 2004. Please register by Tuesday, May 4 to 247-8594.

The Crime Prevention Officer, Shane Schaff, will explain the purpose of the program and recruit volunteers.

The event will take place:

Date: Wednesday, May 5

Time: 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm

Location: Billings Senior Center

360 North 23rd Street

Eric Coobs argues below that I fail to understand that the war in Aghanistan and the war in Iraq are both really just battlegrounds of one war: The War on Terrorism. I certainly do not agree that the wars are one and the same, any more than I believe that the war in Vietnam and the war in Iraq are the same war. These are (or were) sovereign nations; lumping them together under the rubric of a war on terrorism violates international order and our own long-established precedents in ways that should trouble any conservative.

Perhaps I should explain my position on the Iraq War. I can't really say I opposed having a war with Iraq. I supported using the threat of force to compel compliance with UN resolutions. You can't coherently support the threat of force while opposing actual force. I did oppose the Iraqi war resolution because I believe in the Constitution, and the Constitution says that wars should be declared by Congress. Nothing that I see in the Constitution allows Congress to delegate that responsibility to the president.

I always thought Saddam could be pressured into compliance. He is evil, but he isn't crazy. More than anything, including his desire to punish both George Bushes, he wanted to maintain control of Iraq. That's why he allowed UN inspectors in. That's why he was destroying weapons that violated ceasefire sanctions even as troops were massing on his borders. The inspectors kept asking for more time, and it never made a lick of sense to me that they shouldn't have it. The whole situation eventually began to feel to me like World War I: We had to mobilize troops because we wanted to pose a threat; we had to start a war because we had mobilized the troops. Thus the threat becomes the war.

Wars are inherently destabilizing. They always produce unintended consequences, and most of those consequences are bad. That's why they should always be avoided when other options remain. I thought we still had plenty of options.

I never supported invading Iraq just because Saddam was a bad man. That has never been U.S. policy, and what has happened in the last year illustrates why. It's one thing to intervene in a foreign country for humanitarian purposes when the existing order has broken down, as in Rwanda, or Serbia, or Liberia. It's another to attack a country that is more or less stable.

Leaders like Saddam don't arise out of nowhere. He is the product of longstanding cultural, religious and political schisms in Iraq. It just seemed incredibly naive to me to think that we could kick him out of power, establish a Western-style democracy and make a graceful exit, all in record time. Nothing that has happened since has changed my opinion.

Just pulled my last shift of the semester up at the MSU-Billings writing lab and turned in the grades from my German class. Maybe I'll blog more now, or maybe just spend more time doing my real hobby. I mean job.

In comments to the post below, I get a bit snippy with a writer who casually tosses off the usual slur about liberal journalists. Sorry, but he picked the wrong day to push that particular button. I had just been wading through a lengthy analysis at Instapundit (scroll down to the April 25 entries) that makes, or at least presents, some of the same arguments. What Instapundit says is pretty standard blogosphere fodder, but it's more annoying coming from him because he is a genuinely smart guy and a star of the blogging world. For my favorite response, go to an actual newsman.

I have written on this topic here and here, among other places, and I won't waste time repeating those arguments. But I do want to comment further on an Instapundit response that says low pay in journalism means that journalists are out of touch with their readers.

There is much to be said for this. A college graduate's first job in journalism pays less than any other degree out there. Reporters who are good at their work can eventually do much better, but many quit before that happens. News outlets rarely do much recruiting at the college level, underpay interns and make no effort to sign rising stars to see if they develop. This has consequences in local news coverage (although any knowledgeable person could come up with long lists of exceptions to the points I am about to make):

1. Beginning reporters rarely own homes so property taxes don't mean much to them. They don't have kids in school, so they don't care about the school board. SIDs, zoning issues, paved streets -- all the usual give and take of local politics -- don't have much relevance to their lives.
2. They don't get out much because they can't afford to get around. At the first newspaper where I worked, we hired so many newly minted college grads trying to coax a few thousand more miles out of their decrepit vehicles that we had a running joke we wanted to insert into employment ads: "Opening for general assignment reporter. Reliable transportation a must. Journalism skills preferred."
3. Young reporters know they will have to move up in the journalism world to make a decent living, so they feel no particular ties to the community in which they live. This is especially true in television.
4. They often work nights and weekends, so they aren't out and about when most people are. Instead, they tend to hang out with each other and bitch about their jobs.
5. The reality of low pay narrows the field of prospective journalism candidates. I think that's one reason so few conservatives go into the field. Money matters to them. Journalism attracts people who are motivated in other ways. Not many in the frat crowd wind up in journalism.
6. As a general sort of principle, the working poor probably are more likely to look on government spending as a way to help keep themselves afloat. They won't generally complain about welfare, public transportation, free clinics and publicly maintained parks and museums. If taxes go up, that's OK by them.
7. Although beginning journalists don't make much money, their bosses do. Newspaper analyst John Morton has called daily newspapers the most profitable legal business in America. Do well educated poor people who work for rich people ever resent that? Is that resentment reflected in their general attitude toward big business and corporate America? Did Butte miners back the union?
8. Because of the monk-like ethical expectations of their job, journalists don't get involved in politics, join activist groups or try in any of the usual ways to effect social change. Typically, they don't even join service clubs.
9. Because of their skeptical nature, journalists don't much go to church. Again, lots of exceptions here, but I think it's generally true.
10. Because so many readers casually dismiss journalists as inherently unethical, corrupt, politically biased and incompetent, journalists learn not to pay much attention to what people say about them. When a well-meaning critic says something that's genuinely constructive, it often gets lost in the cacophony.
11. For all that, most journalists remain convinced that they are doing socially important work with lasting value for freedom and democracy. Increasingly, they seem to be about the only people who still believe that.

I had an interesting evening Thursday night on a call-in talk show about the media and the environment on Yellowstone Public Radio. Kris Prinzing hosted, and I was on the panel along with Todd Wilkinson, an occasional Outpost contributor and author of Science Under Siege; and Frank Allen, head of the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources in Missoula.

The Institutes recently completed a two-year study of environmental journalism in the West. The American Journalism Review wrote a story about it, and I wrote about it here, but apparently no other Montana newspaper has mentioned it.

It was a fun evening, although we probably all agreed on too many things for it to be riveting radio. I thought about throwing in a few contrarian opinions just to liven things up, but it's hard to take exception when people are saying things that I have been arguing for years: about the tyranny of "objectivity," the dangers of media consolidation, the political demonization of those who disagree, and the general lack of resources in Western newsrooms. Even the callers mostly agreed with what we had to say, except for one odd sort out of Red Lodge who wanted to talk about the Roberta Drew case and even took an incoherent shot at the proprietor of the City Lights blog. I thought about defending Ed, then I figured, hey, not my job. I hope you would do the same for me, Ed.

I think the whole discussion might be streamed online one day soon, but that entire topic is beyond my technological ken.

Jim Hightower has an outrageous item (scroll to the last item) about government attempts to block a Kansas beef producer from testing all of its cattle for mad cow disease. The government claims that it doesn't allow private testing, even by certified labs. The real reason? Hightower guesses (and he's probably right) that the big processors don't want to test all of their animals, and they don't want to have to compete against anybody who does.

Why people don't vote, No. 786: The GOP E-Brief chides Democratic Tracy Velazquez, running for Denny Rehberg's seat in the U.S. House, for "bragging up" the NCAA championships by basketball teams from her home state of Connecticut.

"Though Valezquez has good reason to be proud of her favorite Connecticut athletic programs," the E-Brief says, "it would be nice for her to show a little enthusiasm for some Montana sports teams as well."

What a great thing it is to live in a state with so few problems that political parties can spend their time worrying about the favorite sports teams of political opponents.

I am the richest guy in the world.

I'm the guy in the jazz song who says:

"I don't pay income tax
'cause that's just chicken feed.
When the mint runs short.
I call and say, 'What do you need?'"

Just today, I turned down millions of dollars from Angola, Zimbabwe and Nigeria. Millions. Free money. Why me? Because people in those countries know how reliable I am, that's why.

And the lottery money. Millions from Amsterdam. Millions from Mexico City. I don't even answer the e-mails. What do I need with a few million more?

Startups want me on their board of directors. Entrepreneurs want to trade links. I can get Viagara for nothing.

I'm filthy rich. Stinko. Money lies around begging me to pick it up. I don't even lean over. I can't be bothered. I'm king of a cyber universe. Where others see spam, I see untold riches, stretching into an unending virtual future.

Andy Borowitz quotes Saddam Hussein's lawyer as saying that U.S. treatment of the deposed Iraqi leader is just plain cruel.

I keep wanting to write about this in The Outpost but never get around to it so here goes: I count myself among those who found School District 2's mail-in ballot highly unsatisfying. I get a vague but genuine swelling of pride from walking into American Lutheran Church and casting my ballot in person. It makes me feel better the rest of the day.

But this felt more like a paperwork exercise. I kept putting it off, like paying taxes. If the issues hadn't been so important, I might not have voted at all.

Obviously, that's a minority view. Turnout was probably double what it would have been in a normal election. That tells me that:

1. People are too damn lazy or shy to vote in person.
2. People like paperwork.
3. A lot of voters cast mail-in ballots who otherwise would have passed up the opportunity. I have to wonder about people who were motivated enough to invest a stamp but would have been too poorly motivated to actually go into a polling booth. Suppose they were motivated enough to really try to understand what was at stake?
4. Employers are insufficiently flexible in allowing workers off for a few minutes to go serve their country and vote.
5. Election Day ought to be a holiday. As I (and others) have argued, tie the general election in November in with Veterans Day, hold parades with marching bands, salute the flag, recite the Gettysburg Address, and just generally make all the slackers who don't bother to vote feel like the worthless slugs they are. People are dying for that right, dammit!
6. Or some combination of the above (except No. 2). Or I am overlooking something altogether.

The Laurel Outlook explains why it hasn't retracted a Brad Molnar story that I clarified back in February.

The Laurel Outlook gives an in-depth account of how the neighboring daily managed to move Laurel to Delaware. Gazette Editor Steve Prosinski points out that the false history appeared in an "advertorial" rather than a news section but admits that that the distinction is likely to be lost on most readers.

How well I know. I once edited a daily that rejected a wedding announcement because it was submitted after our deadline. The disappointed family bought an ad that eventually wound up in the New Yorker under the headline, if memory serves, "Social notes from all over." I have forgotten most of the errors the short article contained, but I do remember the featured music: "Yazoo, Joy of Mass Desiring." I think New Yorker readers, sophisticated though they might be, also missed the distinction that the errors were generated by the ad department, not editorial.

The Outlook also editorializes that the Gazette should perhaps rethink its policy of trying to suck advertising dollars out of neighboring communities by filling ad pages with bogus stories.

The Helena Independent Record acknowledges the existence of the independent press.

If you didn't read about the history of Laurel in The Billings Gazette's Explore Laurel section on Sunday, you should dig up a copy (I couldn't find it on the web). The article, ostensibly provided by the Laurel Chamber of Commerce, makes many amazing claims, among them:
-- The Laurel area originally was occupied by the Nanticoke Indians.
-- The area was claimed by both Maryland and Pennsylvania's Penn family until 1775.
-- Laurel was once home to the world's largest manufacturer of baskets.
-- Old Christ Church, built in 1771-1772 (before Lewis and Clark!), stands one mile east of Laurel.
-- A nearby cable ferry was once a station along the Underground Railroad and the center of operations for a hated slave trader.
This is little-known information that you wouldn't even find in the Montana News Association. But as a lengthy correction in today's issue notes, the Gazette won't stand behind this story, and it apologizes for any "confusion" it may have caused. The Chamber of Commerce apparently was in Laurel, Delaware, and the editor in charge, if any, not only didn't edit the story but never even glanced at it.
Guess I'll be changing my summer vacation plans to the East Coast.

I see a comment on City Lights making fun of French courage again. Nobody appointed me apologist for France, but this stuff wears mighty thin. Under Napoleon, the French army held off the combined royalty of Europe for a dozen years, losing a 600,000-man army in Russia in 1812, another 350,000 or so in 1813-14 and yet another few hundred thousand in 1815. A standing joke during those years was that the leading natural cause of death among young French men was warfare.

Arguably, the French army has never been the same since, but the French still managed to pour 8.4 million troops into World War I (remember, this is a country the size of Texas). Of those, more than 6 million became casualties, including many thousands of children of wealth and privilege who had no opportunity to spend military service playing politics in Alabama. For several weeks during peak fighting at Verdun, the French lost a soldier every 45 seconds.

The French performed abysmally during World War II, but it wasn't because the soldiers were afraid to die for their country. In a few short months of war, the French suffered 210,000 combat deaths. By comparison, U.S. forces fighting on two fronts over four years lost 292,000 soldiers. We lost 58,000 soldiers in Vietnam (the French fought there, too) and were left militarily, psychologically and politically scarred for a couple of decades. What might the impact have been if we had lost 100 times that number?

If anybody out there has the guts to go tell a French war widow that her loved one died a coward, then have at it. Otherwise, kindly lay off.

I have a couple of free tickets to see Barenaked Ladies in Bozeman on Sunday night. If you're interested, leave a phone number here.

This post by Jacob Levy makes somewhat the same point I make about the Pledge of Allegiance below, only better, damn it.

The Billings Blog does sports!

The real failure of President Bush's approach to the war on terror has less to do with the hearings going on about 9-11 this week than with the Israeli assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin. Despite Yassin's ties to terrorism, his death has aroused near universal condemnation, even while we continue to stalk Osama Bin Laden. Other countries say that the Israeli strike volated international law, and the heck of it is, they may be right.

If we ought to have accomplished anything so far in the war on terror, it ought to have been to work toward some sort of international agreement on how to handle terrorists. The months after 9-11 handed us an unprecedented opportunity to cut across ideological and geographical boundaries and agree that terrorism had to be stopped as a method of bringing about political change, regardless of the merits of the cause. That means we react the same way to a Basque bombing in Spain as we do to an Al Qaida bombing. The president squandered this opportunity, and I'm afraid it will take another disaster to get it back.

Setting aside the case against "under God" below, why is the government involved in the speech business anyway? Why should the government be urging, encouraging, coercing or mandating any sort of speech whatsoever?

When my daughter was in high school, she was on an Odyssey of the Mind team that had to go to the student council for funding to make a trip to the national finals. When the council stood to say the pledge, she declined. It didn't have anything to do with "under God." She was just mad at the government at the time and wasn't in the mood to pledge allegiance. Like her father, she is naturally disinclined to say things she can't say with sincerity and an open heart, which may be one reason we both tend to keep our mouths shut.

Anyway, the outraged student council voted against giving her team any money. Fortunately, the adviser stepped in and advised the student government that it might be provoking a First Amendment battle it didn't really want to have. But how can anyone say that kids aren't coerced into saying the pledge? And why would the government of a free country want to do that?

Stories about the Pledge of Allegiance case in the New York Times and in Slate both indicate that Michael Newdow did a polished job staking out his position against "under God," even drawing applause from spectators. That's remarkable enough, but this statement from Justice Souter may be more remarkable: He wonders whether the "under God" phrase has become "so tepid, so diluted ... that it should be under the constitutional radar."

That, of course, is why good Christians ought to have opposed "under God" along. Hitching the name of the deity to a rote daily recitation to promote purely secular ends belittles and undermines God. The Christian right now claims that taking God out of the classroom destroys the nation's spiritual strength. The right has it exactly backward. Putting into the minds of children an interpretation of God broad enough and bland enough to suit all religions persuades them that God can't be very important or powerful.

You can't have it both ways: If instilling faith in God is so important that it must be part of classroom work in public schools, then the First Amendment has to go. If the concept of God envisioned in the Pledge is so tepid that it is constitutionally insignificant, then why should it matter whether anyone says the phrase or not?

City Lights speculates on what kind of driver Jesus would have been. I was in Missoula last week and visited Matt Gibson, publisher of the Missoula Independent. He said that one reaction to his movie critic's critical review of Mel Gibson's movie about Jesus was from Jesus himself, and He wasn't pleased.

Jesus writes letters to the editors more often than you might think. Most don't get into print because it is damnably difficult to confirm authorship. I suggested Gibson adopt the test I use: Scour the letter for typos, grammatical errors and misspelled words. I don't claim to know much about what Jesus would do in most cases, but I think he would write very clean letters to the editor.

Kudos to President Bush for clearing this up.

Interesting Wal-Mart comment below from jr, who notes that many small retailers would like to offer health coverage to employees but can't afford to. By comparison, he contends, Wal-Mart isn't so bad.

Jr doesn't mention that one reason so many small retailers can't afford health insurance is because of price pressure from companies like Wal-Mart. The little guys aspire to do better but can't manage it. Which makes me wonder why Wal-Mart, the nation's largest retailer, sets its aspirations so low. Surely it could do better.

The real point of my original post was that people who think they are saving money by shopping at Wal-Mart need to look at the full cost. For increasingly nonsensical reasons, America relies on private employers to provide a huge public good: health insurance. Employers that fail to pick up the cost can set prices lower, but that doesn't mean the cost goes away. It just gets absorbed, sooner or later, in one fashion or another, by taxpayers.

Of course, Wal-Mart shoppers can argue that they still come out ahead. They derive the full benefit of Wal-Mart's low prices while spreading the cost of healthcare for Wal-Mart employees among all taxpayers. Nice deal for them, but not necessarily good for the country.

UPDATE: More on Wal-Mart and health insurance here from (who else?) Jackie Corr.

I knew I had something in mind when I wrote about pain the other day, but I couldn't remember what it was -- probably another sign of encroaching age. Then it came to me: It was a review in the March Harper's magazine of "Flesh in the Age of Reason" by Roy Porter. Critic Terry Eagleton wrote, "Taking the British eighteenth century as his patch, Porter reminds us with a mixture of horror and hilarity of just what a sickly lot the intellectual luminaries of the age actually were. Samuel Johnson, blighted by scrofula, half-blind in one eye and half-deaf in one ear, may have twitched and gesticulated as convulsively as he did because of epilepsy, cerebral palsy, Tourette's symdrome, or St. Vitus's dance. He was certainly afflicated by clinical depression and terrified of death. Ridden with phobias and grotesque compulsions, the great lexicographer made clucking noises, obsessively fingered lampposts, and muttered violently under his breath. ... His biographer, James Boswell, suffered nineteen bouts of the clap. ... He also had a sizable drinking problem, which hastened his death. ... The great historian Edward Gibbon was crippled by gout, as well as afflicted with an enlargement of the scrotum that was embarrassingly visible to others. 'Have you never observed through my inexpressibles a large prominency circa genitalia?' he inquired with exquisite delicacy of a colleague."

I'm probably a wuss about pain. That may be because I've been so lucky all my life: no root canals, no wisdom teeh extractions, no bad tonsils, no appendix operations, not even a cavity. I've had a few bumps and bruises -- a broken thumb playing high school football, a bad sprain and a minor concussion from rugby -- but darn few of the painful experiences most people go through just by living, even during an age of modern medicine and great drugs.

My good fortune hasn't made me particularly grateful: Among humans, good health is always a short-term benefit. Now I guess it's my turn to suffer. Over the last year or two, I've several nasty flareups of a particularly painful inflammation -- probably gout, although it has never been diagnosed. It's bad enough in toes and feet, but a real bear when it settles in one knee or the other -- I have had it in both, although not, thank goodness, at the same time. At its worst, it feels like someone has pounded a strip of barbed wire into the fleshiest part of the knee. There have been moments when I quite literally was unsure whether I had the courage to take another step.

As pain goes, this is still relatively minor stuff. When I sit still, it mostly leaves me alone. Drugs, even just Ibuprofen, nearly always help. And, so far at least, it goes away after a couple of weeks.

But it sure makes me wonder what life must be like for people who play in the major leagues of pain: chronic, ongoing, unremitting pain that lasts for months or years with precious little relief. What's really startling is when you consider the extent to which that kind of pain must have been part of the standard human experience for thousands of years before decent drugs came along. Is it any wonder, then, that humans are so petty, vindictive, lowbrow and unproductive? The astonishing thing is that we manage to get as much done as we do.

From Jackie Corr, more on Wal-Mart: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports about a Georgia program for children of parents who can't afford health insurance. Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in the state, with 42,000 workers, and more than 10,000 of the children who are covered under the program have a parent who works for Wal-Mart. That's a far worse ratio than the state's other big employers.

So, gee, maybe everyday low prices means everyday no insurance? And those who think they are saving money by shopping at Wal-Mart are bitching that their taxes keep going up to pay for other people's poor kids. Maybe it's worth thinking about how those kids got so poor in the first place.

Paul Whiting sends along this link in support of my ongoing contention that the roles of liberals and conservatives have become bizarrely reversed in American politics.

I was sorry to see that The Gazette fell for this story. PETA tried to get us to bite, too, but I wouldn't go for it. The conversation went something like this (after the PETA spokesman explained what PETA was up to).

Me: But Jesus ate meat, didn't he?
PETA: Well, I'm not an expert on that. We're just saying that Jesus would have objected to how corporate farming methods treat animals.
Me: Is Mel Gibson a corporate farmer?
PETA: No, but he feeds animals into that corporate chain.
Me: So you're just picking on Mel Gibson because he's famous.
PETA (with an uncomfortable chuckle): Well, I guess you could say that.
Me: I don't think that's fair. We're not covering that.
PETA: Well, thanks for talking to me.

I've always had a bit of secret sympathy for PETA (are there really people who oppose the ethical treatment of animals?). Even when PETA protests started to get outrageous, I thought they were at least brave and might even be smart. Sometimes you can arrive at a reasonable compromise by starting with an unreasonable position.

Lately, though, PETA has gone too far even for me, and an organization is in trouble when it starts alienating sympathetic simpletons like me. And I certainly feel no obligation to cover a story that exists only because some activist group thinks reporters might be tempted into creating it.

Of course, that's easy to say when you have no time or money to cover the story in the first place.

If you haven't been following the discussion at www.billingsnews.com on the school bond issue, you should be. Lots of good posts. Just click on the survey at the top right of the page. You don't even have to vote to read the comments.

In the Montana Green Party Weekly Bulletin, Paul Stephens calls on Bob Kelleher to quit call himself a Green:

"So, Bob, before you burn any more bridges or incur the wrath of Greens who otherwise might work with you, or even learn from you on the issues of Parliamentary government, state ownership of public utilities, mineral rights, water rights, etc., I will ask you publicly to quit calling yourself a Green and quit disrupting and fragmenting our party. I know you are still a Democrat at heart, and are angry at your party for violating your personal ethical and social beliefs. You apparently hold that anyone who chooses to terminate her pregnancy, or helps her do so, is a criminal and should be punished, accordingly. This is a view which has no place in the Green Party, and I think we'd outvote you 95 to 5 or so on that issue, in case you still believe in the democratic process."

Pat Dawson's Oct. 9, 2002, column on Marc Racicot's military service was picked up by Buzzflash, which resulted in a ton of new comments on the topic. Further evidence that for those who served, and for those who didn't, Vietnam remains a touchstone issue.

OK, here's a nickel's worth of sympathy for CBS, which it can apply toward its FCC fines: The sleazy world of modern network television wasn't created by CBS, although it certainly must shoulder some of the blame. But the networks are in an impossible situation. They broadcast on publicly owned airwaves, yet are forced to earn a living in an increasingly crude marketplace. And their share of that marketplace is falling rapidly. As soon as Janet Jackson's 1 1/2 second exposure went off the air, it became the most downloaded item in internet history. CBS provides the titillation, then one of its prime competitors cashes in, and CBS is left catching the heat.

The self-righteous Michael Powell bears more of the blame than CBS. He is presiding over the tranformation of the airwaves from a publicly owned trust to the private property of a few mega-conglomerates with no values other than the bottom line. Having made that decision, it's a bit late in the game to get prissy about what those bottom-line entertainment values really are.

To my surprise (and not-quite-secret delight) the whole Bush military service issue seems to be taking off. Two posts on other blogs have set me off: This one argues that Kerry is insulting those who served in the National Guard and this one argues that you can't logically oppose the war and support the troops. Since I was inflamed enough by both arguments enough to post comments, I suppose I should comment on my own blog. So here goes:

Two groups of young American males made terribly difficult choices during the Vietnam War: those who volunteered for combat and those who actively opposed and resisted the war. The first group risked death and dismemberment; the second risked prison and diminished job prospects. Some, like Kerry, were in both groups. The rest of us found some easier route. We stayed in school, or we cashed in our daddy's reputation, or we volunteered for relatively safe duty, or we joined the National Guard or reserves. None of those choices was entirely risk free. National Guard units could, and did, get sent to the front lines; radio operators like me would have been wiped out in the first few minutes of a Soviet invasion of West Germany. Mostly, though, Guardsmen pulled relatively light duty, and I worked on my German and acquired an inextinguishable thirst for German beer. What we did wasn't disgraceful, but it sure wasn't heroic. When I was in basic training, a common joke was that the initials for National Guard stood for "Not Going."

I don't really much care whether Bush served all the time he owed the National Guard. I do care if he is lying about his service all these years later. And I especially care if the president who has ordered troops into two wars still hasn't decided where he stands on the one war he could have fought in himself.

Those things matter because we are still in the middle of a war that strikes me as far less justifiable than Vietnam ever was. I opposed the war and am appalled by it. But if supporting the troops means that I favor spending every penny it takes to bring the war to safe conclusion, then I support the troops. And I would willingly support them with real dollars, not vague deficit dollars to be repaid somewhere down the road. My fear about this war is not that I will be proved wrong but that I will be proved right. I would rather have hawks ridicule me to my grave than to have one more soldier die unnecessarily. If it isn't possible in this country to oppose the war and still support the troops, then the war already has been lost.

I'm no defender of Lee Enterprises, as this week's column attests. But I usually defend the company, or at least the Gazette, from liberal bias charges. It's not that I think there is no liberal bias in the media, it's that I think the public perception is so wildly overblown that it would be closer to the truth to cavalierly dismiss all the allegations rather than try to sort through them.
But even I have a hard time defending this headline from Tuesday's Gazette. Does the story back up this remarkable claim? Not in the least. Rehnquist defends the right of judges to decide for themselves whether to recuse themselves from cases. If he defended the right of judges to be biased, it didn't show up in the six paragraphs that made it into the paper.
The headline is accurate on its face. People do have a right to be biased. But judges have no right to let that influence their legal decisions. And copy editors shouldn't let bias influence the headlines they write.

Wesley Clark is catching heat for failing to repudiate Michael Moore's charge that George W. Bush was a deserter. You can find the relevant transcript here. For the pro-Bush side of the argument, go here. Plenty of places to look for the anti-Bush position: You could start here.
It strikes me that Michael Moore uses "deserter" the same way Ann Coulter uses "traitor," as a political slur of convenience, with no respect for the actual meaning of the words. But he is a provocateur par excellence: His bandying about of the word may have hurt his candidate, but it struck the right chord to stir up a web's nest -- close enough to the truth to provoke debate, close enough to libel to incite Bush fans who would prefer to let this sleeping dog lie.
I'm not sure why I find the debate over Bush's military record so fascinating. I decided long ago that everybody gets amnesty for actions during the Vietnam War, from the gung-ho first lieutenants to the Canadian refugees. I'm willing to give Bush amnesty, too, but I wish he would at first own up to what really happened during his mysterious military career.
After all, if anybody seriously challenged my military record, I know exactly how I would respond: I would ask the Department of Defense to release every scrap of information in my military record; I would dig up whatever documents I still have in my possession; I would scrape together the names of buddies I served with who could vouch for where I was and what I did. In short, I would be able to account for virtually every day I spent in uniform.
I was neither a brave nor a happy soldier, but I served honorably and have nothing to fear from whatever scrutiny anyone might wish to bring to bear on the issue. Why doesn't Bush feel the same way?

In his Sunday column, Ed Kemmick gives Meriwether Lewis credit for writing the "most decorous and roundabout description of breaking wind ever set down."
Roundabout, maybe. But surely no more decorous than Mark Twain's classic description of farting as a "clearing of the nether throat."

I'm beginning to get a handle on my two new jobs, so I will take a few minutes to post now and again.
Sorry I didn't make the Blogger Bash. I had two reasons that seemed good at the time:
1. I haven't actually been blogging, and there's the moral from a Hemingway anecdote: Don't talk about why you're not writing. Just write.
2. I would have had to go back to work afterward. I hate going back to work after having a couple of beers, even more than I hate going back to work after not having a couple of beers.
I do want to weigh in on Steve Prosinski's comments from City Lights about Gazette editorial endorsements. He was responding to criticism by Eric Coobs that Gazette endorsements are anonymous and predetermined. I have no reason to doubt Steve's account of how the process worked in the race Eric was in. No argument there. I do know that on occasions in the past Gazette endorsements have made independently of, and probably prior to, the editorial board's interviews with candidates. I know because I was on the editorial board at the time, and I am not proud of it. But that was a different era.
The larger point is about the anonymity of endorsements. Steve says they aren't anonymous; they are made by an editorial board whose members are named on the editorial page from time to time. It's an argument I have made myself, and it's accurate as far as it goes.
But Eric's complaint is such a common one that I wonder if editors aren't missing something here. When George Bush gives his State of the Union speech tonight, no one will complain that he failed to name the speechwriters who actually composed the words. Everybody understands that the speech is a group effort and that the president is ultimately responsible for what comes out of his mouth.
Historically, newspaper endorsements have operated on the same principle. The "official" editorial, usually in the upper left-hand corner on the opinion page, was designed as the publisher's space. No matter who actually writes the editorial, it represents the views of the publisher, and the publisher is responsible for those views. Even on newspapers that have editorial boards, the publisher normally operates on the "plus one" rule: Every member of the editorial board has one equal vote. The publisher has votes equalling that total, plus one. Even publishers who voluntarily surrender control of the board, are still responsible for its decisions.
It actually isn't a bad system. Under the best circumstances, it allows editors and reporters to do their work more or less free from the publisher's influence. And the publisher can still use the space on the opinion page to tell buddies at the Chamber of Commerce that she (or he) is on their side. At a seminar I once attended on editorial writing, the presenter was asked if it bothered him when the publisher killed one of his editorials. Not at all, he said, so long as the publisher writes another one of the same length.
To modern editors, though, that all sounds a bit autocratic. They want the paper to come off as the reader's pal, a friendly, democratic kind of place where decisions are reached by reason and consensus. And publishers, as the good corporate drones they have become, aren't fond of sticking their necks out. So they set up elaborate editorial boards and never explain how they really work. Readers smell something fishy and react the way Eric did.
The solution? One, of course, is to get rid of "official" editorials. As many critics have complained, newspapers can't have opinions; only people can.
On the other hand, I still think there is something valuable going on when a newspaper takes a public stand on issues of importance, such as on who is going to get elected. If nothing else, endorsements let readers know where biases lie. But papers could be more open about what those official opinions really mean.
Forgive me, Lord, for I have blogged.

A few people have asked about my lack of recent blogging. My holiday hiatus seems to have turned into a permanent vacation. Just for the record: Blogging here will be light to nonexistent for the next few months, if not longer.
Something has to give. I start teaching German again next week, and I need to be reviewing irregular verbs and noun genders. I’ve been struggling through Thomas Mann for the last week – tough enough in a good English translation, downright overwhelming in the original, and a stark reminder of how much work lies before me.
I also will be working in the writing lab at MSU-Billings a few hours a week. At least that doesn’t require prep time, but if I am going to be bright-eyed at 8 a.m. on Monday, I am going to have to finish The Outpost sometime before 6 a.m. That hasn’t been happening often enough.
At the same time, pressure on The Outpost keeps getting worse. I spend twice as much time keeping books as I did a year ago. Our staff size has doubled, which means I actually have to try to be a manager some of the time. I’m in charge of distribution again. One of our best freelancers, Linda Halstead-Acharya, has been hired away by The Gazette.
Worst of all, the Thrifty Nickel keeps cutting rates and signing up customers to long-term contracts in an effort to force us out of business. I don’t necessarily blame the Nickel, which now sees us as a real threat, even though the Nickel’s woes were self-inflicted. We pose no real danger to the Lee Enterprises juggernaut – Lee CEO Mary Junck earned enough in bonus alone last year, not to mention salary and stock options, to run this whole company for a couple of years. But we do pose a threat to the jobs of a few Lee employees who could be shoved out the door if they don’t meet Iowa’s profit expectations. And they have reacted like we were out shooting babies. We are fighting for our survival here, and victory is by no means assured.
The two best pieces of business advice I have ever received keep coming back to me. One was from Chris Dimock, who teetered on the edge of bankruptcy before turning Western Technology Partners around. “Businesses don’t fail,” he told me. “Their owners just give up.”
The other advice was from Outpost columnist Roger Clawson, who has committed occasional acts of capitalism. “You can get more work done in 80 hours than you can in 40,” he said, “but you can’t get twice as much done.”
That law of diminishing results has come home to roost – so much so that I am willing to resort to cliches rather than think out what I really want to say. I work more hours now than ever and get less done. More than six years into this, without a day off in sight for another six months, I’m just tired: tired of working, tired of missing nearly everything that goes on around me, tired of being broke, tired of being tired. I know that sounds like whining, but if you can’t whine on your own blog, where can you whine?
Something has to give. I don’t particularly want it to be blogging, which is mostly fun and sometimes rewarding. But it doesn’t pay, and I don’t see it paying off any time soon. I think the medium has promise, and may even become essential, even though I don’t know that it will ever reach the aspirations of its most enthusiastic practitioners. Despite the promise of the technology, bloggers basically remain pamphleteers. And no blogger has managed to do what an earlier pamphleteer, Thomas Paine, did 200 years ago, even without comments enabled.
The blogosphere’s level of ignorance about and antipathy toward established journalism continues to amaze and trouble me. I’ve even seen bloggers argue that it doesn’t matter if major media disappear because the wire services would still be around – as if the AP would keep cranking out copy all by itself for eternity, like a salt machine at the bottom of the ocean.
A week or two ago, a blogger wrote that the holidays provided more evidence of the superiority of blogging to conventional media, because paid journalists take the holidays off while bloggers keep plugging away. Amazing. I’ve worked more holidays over the last couple of decades than lots of firefighters and police officers, and I worked till 10 p.m. four straight nights this year just to get far enough ahead to take Christmas off. Some bloggers have no clue.
Of course, the beauty of the medium is that it is self-correcting. But I find myself wasting time responding to the lamest arguments. Last weekend I spent the better part of an hour crafting an intricate response to some ignorant posturing about the relationship between profits and objectivity in journalism. The next day I wanted to go back and see if my comments had drawn any response. But I couldn’t remember the blog or the path of links that had taken me there. My comments, as usual, had vanished into the ether.
Something has to give. It’s gotta be blogging.