Going Down the Drain

Whether you care to acknowledge it or not, the three men pictured above are losers, each in their own way; collectively, they are the beginning of the end of the Republican Party.

Ronald Reagan – former union head – would not recognize them as Republicans.  The Tommy Thompson we knew as Governor of Wisconsin has nothing in common ideologically with these three, yet he now panders to the tea people and tries his best to distance the “new Tommy” from the record of the man who was the most popular governor in state history.

Mitt just can’t close the deal, because he can’t relate to regular folks.  Reagan could and did.  Carter couldn’t.  Clinton could do it in spades.  George Bush (dubya) was often described as a guy you’d like to sit down and have a beer with. His dad – not so much.  Obama is….well, I’m not sure.  But Mitt keeps putting his foot in his mouth talking about the “right height” of trees in Michigan, and how his wife drives a couple Caddies.

Newt is – I don’t know.  Not a factor right now.  He’s damn smart; thinks well on his feet and knows how to play to an audience, but – he’s just not “it”.  He can be and say very nasty things, and people just don’t like that.

The trio above represent an epic fail on the part of the Republican Party, akin to the sort of fail the Wisconsin Democrats have going for them in the inevitable Walker recall election.

And Santorini – well, he’s just plain bat-shit crazy, living in a 12^th-Century world of hatred, fear, ignorance, and superstition.  Says Obama is a snob for wanting every kid to have a chance to go to college, a place Santorini calls –and this is a direct quote – “indoctrination mills” that “harm” the country.  He and that Nass asswipe from Whitewater ought to get along really well.  Yet all seven, or eight, or however many kids Santorini has, have gone or will go to college.

Santorini said John Kennedy’s 1960 speech about separation of church and state made him want to puke.  That’s the thing with a lot of these tea people: they only like the parts of the Constitution and Bill of Rights they agree with.  Sorta like the 60’s candidate for Dane County DA, Eddie Ben Elsen, who ran on a platform which said we should “obey only the good laws”.

Santorini’s “position” on women and gays is straight out of the small-town south of the 1930’s.  That crack his patron made about women in his day using an aspirin for birth control (holding it between their knees) was clearly indicative of the mindset of someone who has no understanding of the world we live in.  Alan Simpson calls Santorini “rigid and homophobic”; Arlen Specter says “it is not realistic for Rick Santorum to represent America”.

Santorini’s understanding of Roman Catholic doctrine and dogma is a world removed from the small Catholic Church I knew as a young man growing up in Hortonville; it was during the era of Vatican II and it was a tough time for the Polish Pastor of Sts. Peter and Paul Church, Rev. Leo Przybylski, who replaced the Hungarian pastor of my earliest years, Fr. Jaraslov Pulc.  Both men were more comfortable in their native tongue than English; refugees of the big war, I’m guessing; and Rev. Przybylski (pronounced “sha-BIL-skee”) struggled to adapt to the myriad changes brought about by his leader in Rome, but firmly believed that the church had to change with and adapt to the times to be relevant.  That’s something (change) Santorini is definitely not comfortable with, which to me makes his theology irrelevant – which is as it should be for a candidate for President, but since Santorini insists that religion is government, is more than a bit troubling.

But Santorini’s wife suggests her husband’s success is “God’s will”, and if so, we’d best set our clocks back about a thousand years.

Headed to Five Bucks a Gallon?

Increasing prices at the pump seem to be more of a self-fulfilling prophecy than a reflection of the marketplace.  When the media start doing stories saying there are predictions that gas will hit four bucks a gallon by Easter, and five bucks a gallon by this summer, voila!  It happens.

I’m convinced the free market has little, if anything, to do with this.

The “free market”, by the way, is a world market.  The U-S can do almost nothing to control the price of a barrel of oil; that’s done by the countries that produce the oil, a list on which the U-S is way down toward the bottom.  But anyone who’s observed the market can quickly point to many examples of domestic gas prices increasing while crude oil prices are decreasing.

Last week, when the price of gas rocketed up in Madison (and nowhere else in Wisconsin) the usual sources talked some ridiculous crap about a problem with a refinery in Washington state and Iran rattling sabers about the Strait of Hormuz.

I have nothing but a firm conviction to support my belief that oil companies jack up prices simply because they can; and they do it at a whim.

I had a relative (who passed away many years ago) who had more than a nodding acquaintance with the pricing strategies of major domestic breweries – back when big breweries like Anhueser-Busch were actually American companies – and he said back then one of the reasons it was so hard for local breweries to get a toe-hold was that if a local brewery started making a dent in sales of one of the major national brands, that brand would simply drop the case-price and up the advertising in that market, until their market share was recovered. 

This didn’t even nick the big brewery’s bottom line, because it would simply raise the case-price and drop the advertising budget in markets where there wasn’t a challenge.

I think this is what is operating, on a global level, with the oil companies.  Of course, where you buy your gas has more to do with where you are at the time you need it, than any sort of “brand loyalty” that may have existed in the past. 

The five largest private oil companies in the world – BP, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, Exxon-Mobil, and Shell – are phenomenally profitable entities.  Over the past decade they have booked nearly a trillion dollars in profits.  Yet, here in the US, since the oil companies walk both sides of the street by giving huge donations to the campaign coffers of both political parties, they’re on track to get 46 billion dollars in federal subsidies in the next decade.  Disconnect?  You bet.

So stand by to pay a lot more for a gallon of gas in the next few months.  The gas companies will be hiking prices mainly because they can, and will pocket more windfall profits.

The solution isn’t more drilling and domestic exploration.  The solution is to develop transportation technologies that break the stranglehold the oil companies have.

Don’t hold your breath.

Ryan Braun: We'll Never Know

Nothing is secret any more.  People who are supposed to keep their mouth shut don’t.  Confidential, even secret stuff, is leaked all the time now.

ESPN did what it does: report sports news.

Associated Press (which holds the copyright to the photo above) did what all too many once-trusted news organizations are doing today: made a horrid mistake in first reporting Braun was suspended, and then blaming their mistake on a “typo”.

Braun did what all ballplayers who test positive do:  deny, deny, deny.

And while the word “herpes” is not to be found in any FACTUAL reporting of the Braun story, a lot of people think some medication Braun was taking for herpes is what caused the unusual spike in his PED test.

Far too many of my acquaintances used the word “innocent” in Tweeting or Status Updating about the Braun story yesterday, and too many of those acquaintances should know damn well that “not guilty” does NOT mean “innocent”.

Braun got off on a technicality, and that happens.  It happens in courts of law, it happens in life.

We’ll never know.

That said, Go Brewers.

Disappointed, but not Surprised

Russ Feingold.  Now a big-shot with the Obama reelection campaign.  Super-PAC money galore.  Of course, when it’s YOUR Super-PAC, it’s good; when it’s the other candidate’s Super-PAC it’s “anonymous special-interest money”.  Dammit, Russ – run for Governor.  You and Tommy would make for the most interesting election in state history, and to be honest, no matter which of you two is elected, the people of the state win.

Pat Richter.  Didn’t do what he said he was going to do, and put a note of reprimand into John Chadima’s file back in the late 90’s when a drunken Chadima asked a star UW football player to drive him home, and the kid got picked up for DUI.  The slime that keeps oozing from the Chadima saga is enough to make you puke.  Man, that jock club over there at the big college on the lake is one closed society.  Everybody’s got everybody else’s back.  Unless it’s a little guy.

The UW School for Workers.  They caved to pressure from that pissant Steve Nass and his blowhard mouthpiece Mike Mikalsen, and cancelled an art show scheduled next month which would have featured the art and creativity of the poster-makers, singers, songwriters, videographers and others who used their talents at the Capital uprising last year.  Never mind that a lot of this stuff was used recently in an exhibition put on by the Smithsonian; pecker-head Nass doesn’t like it and threatened the school’s funding if they went ahead with the show.

Rick Santorini.  Yah, I know that’s not his name, but that’s what I call him, because that’s what Tony Soprano called him.  You want to make the election about evil, birth control, abortion, and religion?  Really?  Really?  That’s what you got – Obama is a muslim and birth control is evil?  Nice platform, loser.

Winter.  This is it?  This is what you got?  Not a single snowfall of six inches or more this “winter”? Last December I dropped eleven-hundred bucks to buy a snorting beast of a snowthrower, which was used twice last year and not once so far this winter.  I’ve only used my little two-cycle one-stage snowthrower a couple times this year.  The minute I wrote the check for that snorting beast, winter packed up and left town. 

By the way, the photo of the cat, above, is one of the many intriguing images you get when you Google-image "disappointed".  I just thought it was cool.

The Trifecta!

This morning, one of the local TV’s (I don’t want to say which one, but the channel number is somewhere between 26 and 28) made my trifecta of media lunacy.  First, in a post two below this one, I talk about the “reporter” for Politico who thought the state flag of Wisconsin was a union banner; second, in the post directly below, I talk about ESPN using the word “chink” in a story about NBA phenom Jeremy Lin; and today – well, as my wife said, if the news director of this local station was watching the morning show and saw this story, his breakfast probably started coming back up.

First, a bit of background.  (If you know Teagan Marti's story, you can skip the next four paragraphs.)

If you’ve been around Madison for a couple years, you know the story of Teagan Marti, the teen girl from Florida who came to the Dells a year and a half ago to experience a thrill-ride she’d seen on TV.  When she got on the ride, things went horribly wrong, and Teagan ended up free-falling a hundred-plus feet to the concrete below because the net which was supposed to catch her was not in place when the operator dropped Teagan.

She was taken by Med-Flight to Madison, where the miracle workers at UW Hospital and American Family Children’s Hospital worked diligently to save her life and give her the best chance to recover as much as possible from the horrible accident.  We saw the story unfold through local media reports for several months, and, as Meagan’s mom told the crowd Saturday night at Monona Terrace for the American Family Children’s Hospital gala, the family felt that “Madison had adopted them”, with the outpouring of love, care, support, and well-wishes the community showered on Meagan and her family while she underwent surgery after surgery and countless hours of therapy.

For those of you who don’t know, in the interest of disclosure, my wife is a Senior Public Affairs official with UW-Health, and she got to know the Marti family pretty well during the months they spent at Teagan’s side in Madison, before she was able to return to Florida to continue her re-hab.  At every milestone along the way, local media did an excellent job of covering the story, following both the story about Teagan’s uphill battle to recover as much as possible from the horrible injuries to her young body, and the story about the thrill-ride operator and why such a horrible thing happened.

As a highlight of this past Saturday-night's gala, the crowd of over a thousand donors and supporters of the Children’s Hospital at the gala were amazed when Teagan and her mom took to the stage to thank the people of Madison for their love and support.  Teagan stunned the crowd by walking, by herself, with the help of a walker, across the stage to the lectern.  And this morning, Teagan and her mom are holding a news conference with the UW-Health people to announce plans for expansion to the Children’s Hospital.

So, now, finally, to the punch-line of the trifecta.  On their Sunday newscasts, all the local TV news stations ran stories about how Teagan had overcome huge odds and is now able to walk, and all showed video of the capper to Saturday night’s gala, with Teagan walking across the stage.  This morning, a reporter for the TV station referenced above, a reporter who’s been in Madison – oh, a couple months or so – gave a live “news” report about the horrible accident at the Dells a year and a half ago, and – irony of ironies- as video of Teagan walking across the stage Saturday night is on the screen – this reporterette said “Teagan, who breathes through a tube and is able to communicate by blinking her eyes…”

Oops.   Copied one sentence too many from a report the station did a year and a half ago.

The point I’ve tried to make in the two prior posts, and am trying to make again in this one, is that incredibly stupid mistakes like this are happening far too often in national and local media.  There’s far too little supervision of the content that makes it on the air or on the internet.  Young reporters make mistakes, and that’s why they have to be supervised.

What it means is that the quality of what’s being billed as news is in decline for lack of supervision and training.  Nobody was really hurt by the stupid mistake this young reporter made this morning, except perhaps Teagan and her mom, if they were watching; and, the credibility of the TV station takes a small hit.

I've said many times radio is dying the death of a thousand cuts; and news in general seems to be headed in the same direction.  And we, the audience, are the losers.

No Filter

ESPN has fired the drooling moron who wrote the phrase “Chink in the armor” (see above) to describe a poor performance by NBA sensation Jeremy Lin, has suspended for a month the anchor who read the words on the air, and has apologized to Lin and Asian-Americans in general for using the term “Chink” when talking about a person of Asian origin.

Far as I’m concerned, they should have canned the anchor’s ass, too.

Some people just have no filter between their brain and their mouth, and those people should not have a job in the media.  I have worked with radio and TV anchors who blithely read scripts on-air, with seemingly no connection between their mind and the crap they’re reading.  Years ago, when I was making money coaching radio and TV anchors, I would preach the gospel of proofreading EVERY script and “owning” every word you utter.

In my prior rant (below), about the clueless dweeb who thought the Wisconsin state flag was some sort of union banner, I decried the lack of any semblance of “editing” in the instant-news, gotta-get-it-on-the-net-or-on-the-air-NOW world of today’s 24-hour news cycle.

If the writer of the script is so clueless as to be oblivious that using “Chink” when writing about a person of Asian origin is likely to be offensive, there used to be at least ONE level of oversight, particularly at the level of “national” media, that would catch the reference and re-write the item.  Not any more.

Admittedly, it’s sometimes hard for the older generation – or, to be honest, at age 62, MY generation – to understand that many of the things we said and terms we used as children are now considered offensive and racist.  Case in point: a few months ago a county supervisor (no, not Dane County, but nearby) talked about “Jewing down” one of the vendors the county was dealing with, and then when called on his slur, this dimbulb asserted that “to Jew down” is a common “business” term that has nothing to do with religion.  (Proving again, as if more proof were needed, that denial is one of the most powerful forces.)

And we don’t need to cite Reggie White’s notorious speech to the state Assembly in March of ’98, when the Minister of Defense used just about every racial stereotype imaginable.

When I was growing up in the early 50’s in a small Wisconsin village, I didn’t even know what a “mick” was the first time somebody called me one; you regularly heard “kraut”, “jerry”, “frog”, “guido”, “Jap”, “Chink”, and a variety of other similar ethnic slurs.  We did know, even back then, that the n-word was not acceptable when speaking of negroes, which was the then-correct term for black folks, like our childhood heroes who played for the Packers or Braves.

Sometimes – when you see stuff like this ESPN gaffe – you wonder how far we’ve really come.

The Politico Gaffe: It Really Happened

Probably millions of people have seen the image and story above, which appeared – briefly – on the politico.com site yesterday.  Politico pulled the story almost instantly, but in the internet age, nothing really disappears.

A lot of people thought this was a fake.  No reporter for a national organization that covers politics – particularly the organization’s White House reporter – would mistake the state flag of Wisconsin for a union banner.   Certainly some editor would have caught this incredibly stupid gaffe and spiked the story, right?

Nope.

Donovan Slack – and by the way, she’s a “she”, not a “he”, as a lot of people have mistakenly referred to her – worked for the Boston Globe for 8 years before taking the job with politico.  When politico was inundated with derisive communications about the stupid mistake, it quickly pulled the story, and later made what serves as a retraction and apology in this day and age.

How can someone who’s had a decade of experience as a “reporter” write a sentence like the lead you see above: “It’s very clear what side President Obama is on here in Wisconsin”.  If you don’t know what’s wrong with that sentence, you’ve never had an editor correct your mistakes.  And how about “…two flags:  an American one, as usual…..”  What kind of semi-literate person would write that?  It looks more like the work of a blogger who’s never had any formal training in writing English.

My point is there’s an abundance of really sloppy stuff that passes for “journalism” these days, which was the theme of my Facebook post on this topic, a post that generated similar responses from a lot of former broadcast news people with whom I remain acquainted.

A couple examples from last night’s local TV fare: one station’s anchor did ten-second inserts promoting the station’s 10 o’clock news which teased “a horrible incident of alleged child abuse”.  ALLEGED child abuse?  You think the young girl in the story did this to herself?  Her parents may be alleged child abusers, but what we’ve got here is certainly not an incident of “alleged child abuse”.   And on an earlier newscast, one of the anchors referred repeatedly to “the one-year anniversary” of the protests in Madison.  (In English, it’s “first anniversary”, if you didn’t know; but news professionals SHOULD know.)

I guess what really bugs me, and apparently a lot of my friends who used to do news for a living, is that way too much stuff like this (“alleged child abuse”, “one-year anniversary”, the lunacy of the politico gaffe) is presented to the public – stuff that not that many years ago would have been caught in edit or review before it ever hit the airwaves or the internet.  The people who do the job today are all too often ill-prepared for the profession; no one mentors them, coaches them, or really supervises their work-product; and newsroom leaders who once would have caught this stuff are either gone, have taken a different job, or are just plain tired of the responsibilities of leadership.

I know I’m painting with a broad brush, because there are still plenty of people in the nooz biz that can write a snappy sentence in clear English with good grammar, who really care about being accurate, who are conscientious and thorough in their approach, and – unfortunately – who are pulled in many directions by the demands of a job which has changed dramatically over the past few years, with deadlines and demands on many platforms instead of one.

But stuff like the politico thing?  Absolutely inexcusable.  They should be ashamed, but I know they’re not.