Author: Hans Eisenbeis

Yesterday, the Bush administration leaked the bad news that it will likely abandon a proposal to require better gas mileage for the largest SUVs. The reason will come as a surprise to no one: because it might hurt the “fragile bottom line” of many American automakers. See, the funny thing is that CAFE requirements that apply to cars and light trucks do not apply at all to the largest SUVs classed as heavy trucks. In other words there are no requirements whatsoever for Hummers and Ford Excursions and Lincoln Navigators. (The original CAFE regulations were drafted in 1970 and really haven’t been changed since. In 1970, “heavy trucks” were almost entirely commercial. Today, there’s one in almost every driveway in Eden Prairie.) Thus, it also comes as no surprise that sales of these types of vehicles has softened this year, with the meteoric rise in gas prices.

These vehicles were all gravy for automakers, and they will continue to be– the profit margins on the largest vehicles far exceeds those for more reasonable passenger vehicles. If automakers lose a few down-market consumers who are concerned about the cost of running a vehicle that averages in the single digits MPG, so what? The rest of the supercharged upper-class, enjoying the fruits of this amazing economic recovery we keep hearing so much about, will be glad to pay more at the pump. But they could be required to spend more at the dealership too, in order to subsidize better mileage as required by their federal government. The conservative monopoly in public office today can surely be expected to argue against penalizing those who can most afford to show off their banking muscle with the best form of American conspicuous consumerism ever devised. But the more direct, emotional takeaway from all this seems to be that industry is more important than consumers. Americans are, of course, themselves to blame for gas-guzzling behemoth SUVs, and they should lay in the bed they made for themselves. God knows, it is not the role of government to require more responsible behavior by–well, requiring it.

There are some interesting political ramifications of the present conundrum at the gas pumps. When gas prices soar, the people who are most hurt by it are the people who are most dependent on automobiles–professionally, socially, economically–are in the deep-red Western states. These are the people who have been trained to vote against their own best interests by appealing to their own worst instincts. Will the good people of Wyoming see out-of-control gas prices (and, by the way, record profits in the pockets of American gas producers) as a good reason to increase subsidies and tax credits to oil companies? Will they understand that insane gas prices (on a par with what our effette friend in Europe pay, but of course they’re into that whole soft-headed mass-transportation thing) will incentivize alternative, renewable energy sources?

Well no. They want lower gas prices and they want them now, and pretty soon they’ll start blaming the only person they can think of to blame–a president with generational ties to the oil industry.

Whenever my blood pressure feels like it’s getting dangerously low, there are two things I like to do. Eat more anchovies, and watch Bill O’Reilly on Fox. Both anchovies and O’Reilly share the same four virtues: bony, salty, fishy, and strong. I like anchovies a lot more than I like Bill O’Reilly, but both appeal to the latent masochist in me.

If you like your O’Reilly in pure, unadltuerated form, you watch his “Talking Points Memo,” which is the way Bill O’Reilly likes himself best, too, I assume–that is, without any intereference even from the most psycophantic, lying, Fox-enriched lickspittle. O’Reilly unfiltered and on-point, baby. Anyway, yesterday’s TPM featured our hero considering the story of Cindy Sheehan, begrieved mother of a slain U.S. soldier. SHeehan has set up shop outside President Bush’s brush-cutting photo-shoot at Crawford, Texas, the better to protest the Iraq misadventure that took the life of her son.

I don’t normally like to waste a lot of time parsing O’Reilly, but it was a slow day around the office. O’Reilly decribed the situation. First, he very graciously agreed that “everyone is certainly entitled to his or her own opinion, and no one should gainsay the grief of a mother in mourning.” (Conservatives frequently offer this sort of consolation, as if it is something they are normally in the habit of witholding.) Then O’Reilly ran a clip of Sheehan wherein she says President Bush did not offer any kind of earnest sympathy, though he hosted her in the Oval Office for a dilatory handshaking, tear-dabbing moment of personal and national pride. She was felt repelled rather than comforted, which I will assume is also her right.

Then came an interesting leap. O’Reilly’s main point seemed to be that since “radical activists” like Michael Moore and Sam Husseini oppose the war, and since Sheehan opposes the war, she is in league with raving, behorned anti-Americans, and is “being used by them, whether she realizes it or not.” Bill’s final talking point? A fair and balanced moment: “A majority of Americans now oppose the war, but we hope that will change when things start going better.”

Interesting to consider that the Christian Right may begin to use its powers for good–by lobbying President Bush not just for wicked ends like prayer in the schools, but for causes that someone on the port side of the boat can get behind. The New York Times reports today about an exhibit at a Christian rock festival down in Texas designed to put pressure on the Powers That Be to make more demands on North Korea when it comes to human rights. Of course, there are some sorta questionable motives behind such efforts and provocations; one wonders if Texas Christians would be as riled if it were Buddhists or Jews or even Catholics that were suffering under the yoke of oppression under Kim Il Sung. (We doubt whether it’s just evangelical protestant Christians, though they do insist on singling themselves out in so many ways.) And are we the only ones who think conservative Christians seem to take a little too much visceral pleasure in images of genocide, suicide, and homicide–a sort of parallel to the perennial best-selling images of late-term abortion? (Check that last link–not for the squeamish, but read the URLs before and after the jumps.) Anyway, it may be a rare opportunity for left and right to agree on a cause for social justice–though the moment passes, probably, as soon as the discussion reaches the usual fork in the road to diplomacy–blockade or invasion? Carrot or stick?

Splitting the difference is getting to be such a rare art that we hardly recognize it anymore. Following on Jack Shafer’s riff about overplayed media coverage on methamphetamine, John Tiernay today takes a related but slightly more humane tack in the opinion pages of the Times. Rather than argue the Malthusian line that there is no real epidemic until there are countable toe-tags, Tiernay makes the perfectly reasonable argument that hyping the case also tends to artificially inflate the plan. The Drug War, he says, has become a terrible addiction in itself among law makers and enforcers. Of course, this is dangerous, libertarian territory, sidling up to an open flirtation with a policy of legalizing all these drugs that, after all, pale in comparison as public health meance to tobacco, and the whitest whale of all, alcohol. We can all agree that humans seem to require the basic right to medicate, intoxicate, and stupefy as life dictates. But the moment you attempt the moral math to try to impugn some drugs and redeem others, let’s say Kat is bad, but caffeine is fine–you’ve entered an impossible biomedical ring-toss.

Interesting, too, then to consider this interesting piece about the thriving afterlife of Jerry Garcia, who robbed the world of his fifty-three-year-old-self largely by regular and repeated use of the needle. We happened this morning to be reading Elsa Wald’s highly informative profile of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid in this week’s New Yorker (great issue, by the way–wish all double issues were this relentlessly hard to put down), and learned that Reid’s father was a lifelong alcoholic, who after he gave up the bottle, shortly thereafter took a shotgun to his own head. Reid says,”We always joke that Dad sobered up and killed himself.” It is an open question as to which way would have been the better, less painful route to self-destruction.

Over at Slate’s media desk, Jack Shafer has developed a little sub-speciality in debunking investigative stories about various social diseases. It’s wicked, thankless work. Shafer got into a very nasty little donnybrook with New York Times magazine after he nitpicked an extensive story by Peter Landesman on a covert sex-slave ring in New Jersey. Shafer’s typical MO is to argue the numbers in such stories–when the numbers of victims are vague or insufficient or impeachable, he usually disimisses the story as a sensationalistic over-reach of a trend-obsessed media. It’s a fine thing to decry sensationalism, but Shafer could pick easier and more deserving targets; the Times magazine is not really the wall to which that sloppy pasta is going to stick.

Maybe Newsweek magazine is more worthy of Shafer’s rapier. This week, Jack argues that Newsweek’s current cover story on methamphatamine use in the US has a) identified a trend embarrassingly late, and b) overstated the seriousness of the meth problem. Shafer would apparently prefer not to have it written about at all, or maybe as a light , how-to trend story in a bleeding-edge magazine like Vice. If there is not a body count, it is not a serious crisis. Thus it feels like a down week in Shafer’s world, but with yesterday’s massive bombing in Iraq, we’re sure he’ll perk up again by his next deadline.

This reminds us, somewhat ironically, of the contrarian story in the Times magazine a few weeks ago about how “necessary” child safety seats are in cars. That alarming article, written by Dubner and Levitt (the new Freakonomics columnists poached from the world of hardcovers), suggested that a child is no safer in a car seat than out of one. The article used just one standard: mortality. Death. Those of us with children do not measure safety in such a cruel, absolute way. We tend to try to keep our children from the least harm, the better to never have to consider the ultimate heartbreak. Likewise, the fact that two million other children are using crystal meth, and whether or not that constitutes a true “crisis” in the mind of a journalist in Washington, D.C., neither consoles nor excites the soul-sick parent of a meth-addicted teenager.

The desire to innovate is powerful and intoxicating–and without judicious dosage, stupefying. We’ve been checking into MPR’s cutting-edge new program called “The Loop,” and so far we like what we see. It looks like an interesting attempt to mobilize what Chris Lydon has for a while been calling “open source radio.” (Those smarties over at MNSpeak, another rewarding experiment in new media, also noticed the similarity.)

As a preliminary diversion, it’s interesting to think about Lydon’s short stay at MPR after Katherine Lanpher packed her bags for New York City. For the first two weeks, callers seemed to be as ecstatic as we were– Lydon sounded like Daniel Schorr, but he was actually capable of a genteel, gracious, two-way conversation. We’re not sure how a note of hubris began to seep into Lydon’s dulcet baritone, but it seems to be what killed any longer-term relationship with MPR. On the face of it, a Boston brahmin would seem a good fit for the more high-brow pretensions of the Twin Cities public-radio elite. Something started to go wrong in the relationship–we have no inside dope, but we guess that Minnesotans’ well-documented aversion to know-it-alls and show-offs probably was the deal-breaker, as Lydon began to spend more and more time answering his own questions and treating guests like auditors. Anyway, Lydon’s desire to revolutionize media, to pioneer new models for public radio, undoubtedly rubbed off on the Denizens of MPR’s secret star chamber. How else to explain the sudden, violent, nervous change taking place over at MPR? The Current? The Loop? The Rake–whoops, that’s us.

It’s slightly ironic that the folks at The Loop–apparently populated by a disgruntled segment of MPRs business desk–have been chewing on the “big brain” theory, and asking listeners to discuss the assets and liabilities of working in groups. As a media organization, MPR is a kitchen notoriously crowded with chefs, where very little gets done without the consent of whole sections of the interoffice directory. One surely can’t argue that the model has not succeeded–MPR is exceeded in size and quality only by one rival–National Public Radio–but this communtarian approach to decision-making does tend to take the edge off of innovation and honest self-examination. (Where ya gonna go–commercial radio? Haw haw!)

That’s why we think that The Current and The Loop and The Rake–oops, there we go again–smell like the work of one genius working alone, at his desk, in his shoes and shirt-sleeves, late into the night, somewhere close to the clouds at 45 E. Seventh Street. No, not Chris Lydon, who has long since returned to Beantown. We’re pretty sure someone lit the fuse under Bill Kling–probably Bill himself. It’s good to see there’s some fight left in the old dog.

Our distaste for the sordid fare of daytime cable TV news may not be well documented–now that would really be wasting your time–but we do get interested in some of the more broad-ranging dinner-table conversation about what gets played large and what doesn’t. About a year and a half ago, our man Clinton Collins had some interesting things to say regarding the tragic abduction (and subsquent murder) of Dru Sjodin. Sjodin, you know, was an attractive young white blond woman who worked at a mall in Grand Forks, her abductor was some sort of alien sex predator, and that kind of thing will not stand.

The hue and cry reached such a pitch that it even resonated inside the governor’s office; the guber dispatched the National Guard to help in the search, and began shaking his pom-poms for the reinstatement, after a century of limp-wristed civility, of the death penalty. Collins pointed out that this all had a hollow sound and a sour taste to African Americans around the region. Reason being that here in the city, dozens of young African American women and children disappear every year, and it barely raises the pulse of the local precinct’s desk jockey. (Collins’ piece generated a couple remarkable letters.)

Anyway, the story recurs eternally. Over in Philadelphia, the disappearance of LaToyia Figueroa, a young pregnant black woman, did not excite anyone in government or media, but after almost ten days of personal campaigning, a blogger name of Richard Cranium managed to shake the local and national media out of its mid-summer torpor, if only to make a collective ass of itself in trying between yawns to excuse its tardiness.

Anything that records and amplifies what an unpleasant self-idolator Tucker Carlson is–well, that’s just fine with us. Our impressions of daytime TV are not distinct, but we have made our views of bow ties and those who wear them very clear indeed.

One of our pet peeves is private corporations who do legal and grammatic violence to the language. One sin leads to the other. We cringed when Lutheran Social Services coined the new name “Thrivent,” just as we had a nails-on-chalkboard response to “Xcel” and “Qwest.” It would seem that current trends in corporate branding are not only to create memorable neologisms, but to try to be poetic about it, and whole industries have sprung up around welding words together in strange spork-like configurations with no respect for the laws of language. (As the trend proliferates, its results are less memorable, or are simply wrong and misleading–“Thrivent” sounds like an erectile dysfunction medication, but then again, everything sounds like that these days, maybe because there are so many of them. We’re sure the day will arrrive when we have a somewhat more sympathetic attutude, but these days we generally have the opposite problem, and no one considers it a virtue, not even us.)

Today, Chris Riemenschnieder reports that the torch has finally dropped on one of our favorite local bands, the Olympic Hopefuls. Continuing correspondence with the USOC has resulted in a not-unfriendly caution that the USOC has trademarked the word “olympic,” and even goes so far as to suggest that there are Federal laws requiring the committee to enforce the trademark. In other words, meet “the Hopefuls.” We think it’s a shame, and we want to make a stand right now against anyone who wishes to plant their personal or professional flag on any little dry spot within the borders of Webster’s. In fact, our view is that if the word is in common usage long enough to attract the attention of Noah’s minions, then it falls within International waters, and ought to be open to all who wish to travel there.

“Olympic” is a word like that. We might have suggested to Darren and friends that they try “Olympian Hopefuls,” but if the USOC was brazen enough to trademark the one, surely they trademarked the other. We’re reminded of another favorite local band’s one-punch KO at the hands of the corporate poets–remember when Tilt-A-Whirl became Arcwelder?

If the tradeoff is more companies making up stupid names that appear in no dictionary, the better to protect their legal interests, then fine. Frankly, we don’t foresee a sudden run-up in the stock of “Lucent” among poets and novelists, and we pledge never to use that word when another will do as well. Though we have taken note of how some of the world’s best-established brands become effective shortcuts in description (even at the syllabic level, i.e. “McMansions”), some nonsense words are headed for a richly deserved instant oblivion. May they rest in a deep, dark hole capped by a little ® manhole cover.

One of the problems with reading the news online is that it’s more difficult to effectively browse a newspaper’s content. Aside from the odd phenomena of online editors screwing with headlines and decks to make them shorter or hipper or whatever it is they’re trying to do, a web page just doesn’t offer the same facilities for easy browsing. We haven’t looked deeply into it, but the general paradigm seems to be this: The architecture of information online tends to be suited to search and recovery. Generally, that means the best web pages are designed to facilitate you finding something you know or suspect is already there. (Corollary: general interest, web-only “magazines” died slow, uninteresting deaths when the tech-bubble burst five years ago. Slate and Salon are the exceptions that prove the rule.)

The impression we take away from having cancelled our home subscription two years ago to the Newspaper of the Twin Cities, is a troubling one. If you only take your news from the web, you begin to have an indistinct sense of scale on news stories, a random congeries of anecdotal stories driven by momentary impulses and obsessions, a sort of roadmap of links that trace the circuits of your own prejudices, preconceived notions, and moral politics (link, incidentally, a result of browsing our way through the real-world Sunday Times, one paper that still decorates our doorstep. Still, reducing the input by one daily newspaper has saved our back considerably. Recycling is a bitch; we save the Times to start the grill.) The more or less organic structure of content, dictated mostly by chronology, creates the impression that all stories are created equal.

Like we say, online editors probably should bear some of the blame for thinking too literally about information equations. (Everything is just a link away! A shallow, instantly “drillable” website is also a flat website, with no peaks or valleys.) But there is something about the newspaper itself that encourages a general sense of purpose and direction, a heirarchy of information, a page-to-page path through the garden. Websites are not–maybe cannot be–nearly as inviting or as favorable to browsing. As a result, even a crappy paper is better than a great website. When we have more time and feel less fragmented, maybe we’ll consider this more closely. Maybe not. Maybe we’ll just keep paddling blindly around in the little backwater that results fom our own particular trickle valve.

Despite appearances, we’re not particularly bothered about all this chatter regarding the Rove-Plame affair, partly because we’re supposed to be finishing the new issue, you know, putting all the frosting and chopped nuts and confetti on the long-johns here at the doughnut shop. But we noticed an interesting thread over at Romenesko, relative to Mike Miner’s thumb-twiddling at the Chicago Reader. Miner asks why reporters have not done the job of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald–that is, why haven’t reporters themselves discovered and publicized the name of the person who leaked Valerie Plame’s name.

The answer to that is pretty simple, aside from the obvious legal tools that Fitzgerald has to compell witnesses or, say, throw them in jail. (Summarized nicely here, by Aaron Clemens.) Considering that whoever leaked her name knew or should have known that he was committing a federal crime, not a lot of people have the spine or the stomach to go on the record (or even off the record) with such an allegation without dramatic and unimpeachable evidence. That same trepidation affects reporters, and it should. Unless you can prove that Karl Rove is the man you think he is, you run a pretty serious risk of libel. The stakes don’t get a lot higher, though blog-nation loves to play fast and loose with the facts, and frequently turns innuendo into accepted, wife-beating truism. (We’ve stopped holding our breath waiting for the first high-profile libel case to emerge from something someone wrote on a blog… Here in the U.S., it’s relatively hard to win a libel or slander case when it involves public or political figures, which is as it should be, even if it explains Rush Limbaugh’s savings account. We guess it has to do with the fact that so few blogs seem to warrant being taken seriously, present company included, naturally.)

The other element of all this that we find compelling, that no one seems to be writing about, is its meta-media quality–on some level, if you want to get your tinfoil hat out and talk about media conspiracies, it is possible to discuss it under the rubric of political bias, and it might take you in some interesting directions. Time magazine, by caving into the judicial system and Mr. Fitzgerald, might actually be playing to its liberal bias, because it has facilitated the publication of what appears to be Leaker Number One’s name–Karl Rove, who also happens to be Blue America’s Most Wanted. (We dislike him as much as anyone, probably more. But last time we checked, libel law does not stop applying when your intentions are pure and your politics are noble.) Journalists have got themselves into quite a lather over Time’s decision–are they protesting a little too loudly?

No, we think generally they are sincere, even if the New York Times appears to be working overtime (like our managerial friends over there at the Strib) to convince the world of its political neutrality by erring on the side of the right (maybe even going so far as to take pains to use Republican accounting methods in its circulation department). While we like to play both sides of the issue for our own entertainment and edification, we basically agree with our friend Chris Lehmann: No matter what you may think of Judy Miller’s work, she is chilling in the cooler for simply trying to get on with it. She can’t very well repair her tarnished reportorial credentials in an orange jumpsuit and bunny slippers, can she.

But we wonder whether this whole thing really will deflate the courage of other potential anonymous sources the way people are saying it will. Maybe so. How often are these sources breaking the law–or at least bending the rules–to speak to reporters? Probably more than you might think. Cripes, coffee-jerks at Starbucks have to sign confidentiality agreements these days, and unless you are explicitly authorized to shill for your company, there’s a pretty good chance you’re violating some contract somewhere.