Author: rakemag

There’s been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth among the people who write about media concerning the case of NY Times reporter Judith Miller and Time Magazine reporter Matt Cooper, who are facing prison time for doing what they think of as their jobs.

In case you haven’t been paying attention to such things, Miller and Cooper are in trouble with a federal judge for their refusal to name confidential sources to a grand jury investigating who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent to Bush Administration shill Robert Novak after Plame’s husband Joseph Wilson contraticted the President’s assertion Iraq was buying uranium from Niger. (You can also read Novak’s explanation of how and why he did it here.)

Now a lot of us have been wondering why Novak isn’t under threat of jail, because he’s the one who certainly knows who told him about Plame, when Miller, who wrote not one word for publication about the matter, and Cooper, who wrote about the investigation into the leak, are.

Miller and Cooper are asserting their First Amendment right to keep sources confidential, but that ain’t flying with either the judge who is threatening them, or the three judge panel of the D.C. Appeals Court who affirmed his decision. Unless they can get the full Appeals Court, or the Supreme Court (which has already issued a ruling that doesn’t exactly support their position) to hear the case, it looks like the reporters are headed for the hoosegow.

Now, these reporters make a good argument that reporters can’t do their jobs if, in effect, the government uses them as extentions of their own police investigative powers. After all, who in government or industry is ever going to blow a whistle if they know the government can force reporters to give them up?

Today in Slate, Jack Shafer, (the most thoughtful media writer around for our money) has a different take. He suggests Cooper and Miller get a better lawyer, specifically the guy who wrote the law being used to pummel them.

I’ll leave it to you to consider what Shafer hopes will be a better legal strategy to keep Miller and Cooper out of jail, and whether or not, in this case, it’s better to plead it out and let the First Amendment live to fight another day.

Of course, this could also be resoved by a Congress who has the best interests of the nation at heart. Such a Congress would extend its previously passed protections for whistle blowers to those who provide the loud whistle in the first place–the press.

We were saddened the Mark Dayton won’t be running again for the Senate. Oh, we didn’t harbor any illusions about his winning. He would have had a six year record as an unapologetic liberal to run against, he’s not the best speaker in the world, and he can’t finance his own campaign this time.

Although the national Dems would come to his aid, he’d still have to raise millions to fight off the anticipated Republican flood of money. And he hates that…probably because he quaintly believes being a Senator is not about where the money is coming from. As a friend of mine who used to work for Dayton once told me, “He’s a really good senator and a really lousy politician.”

So, whoever is the DFL candidate, and we think it will be Mike Hatch, he’ll have a relatively open field ahead of him, and the ability to run against Bush lapdogs Gil Gutnecht or Mark Kennedy. I really hope it’s Kennedy. That creep has to answer for what he said about Patty Wetterling on earth before he lands in the eternal fire which will be his eventual reward.

The Editor in Cheese beat us to the punch today in commenting on Verlyn Klinkenborg’s essay in the NY Times on the Iowa brain drain.

Klinkenborg blames it a lot on the state’s encouragement of industrial farming and the resultant slaughtering not only of pigs, but also the family farm and all the real jobs that went with it.

The only part of Iowa I know well, where I grew up, is the example of exactly what Klinkenborg describes. The downtown, which used to house all local businesses, including two department stores, a mens clothing store owned by my girl friend’s father, a record store where you could actually listen to the record before you bought it, and an appliance store where the owner would wait on you personally and give a deal on a portable stereo to an impoverished college student who had once dated his daughter (after the clothes store daughter dumped me.) There was a movie theater that had a Saturday kids movie club for 35 cents a ticket, (Disney movies were 50 cents,) and another movie theater across the street that had a short life as an “adult” movie house before becoming a teen concert venue briefly before being torn down. The tallest building in town–at six stories–was full of doctors and dentists and lawyers.

The upper floors of that building are now condos. The main floor, is now home to a “loan” business. There’s one new office building built several years ago for an agricultural insurance company which was run into bankruptcy by its corporate controllers, destroying the pensions of their employees while enriching themselves. There’s a forlorn four-plex movie house at one end of the erstwhile retail mall, which received government subsidies to supplant the local merchants, then failed itself.

The rail yards which used to handle the farm produce have moved north and west, mostly to Nebraska, where they got a better tax deal, no doubt, from a state that turned Republican before Iowa did. The local food processing companies have long since sold out to Con-Agra. Immigrants were imported (no kidding) to fill the jobs the native Iowans didn’t used to want.

There used to be three funeral homes near downtown. Now there is one big one–part of a chain that has bought them up all over the Midwest. Here, dying is big business.

On the far edge of town, there is some economic activity: a new mall full of chain department stores and, you guessed it, a Wal-Mart. But, the biggest industry in town is now gambling. Like Pawlenty here, they saw gambling as the solution to their economic ills. A lot of jobs were created in the three big casinos, but you know the sort of jobs we mean–the sort that employs the locals to sweep up, make change, deal the cards and clear the buffet tables. The management talent comes from Vegas, and the profits go back there, less, of course, what they cosmetically donate to civic projects like the community college where they train their next generation of food service workers.

All evidence suggests Iowa is the next state about which someone will write a book like Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas.” The state turns conservative at the same time it is turned into a third world natural resource and labor supply for the corporate grist mill. The sweet smell of the freshly fertilized rolling corn fields has been replaced by the sour mountains of pig shit from the pork factory farms. The sound of the train whistles I could hear from my bedroom window late at night is drowned by the clinking of the slots.

This story by David Sheff in yesterday’s NY Times Magazine about his accomplished but drug-addicted son is a cautionary tale. I don’t have anything to add to it, other than to recommend it and remember that “there but for the grace of God…”

There were two good pieces yesterday on the role of the press, or lack thereof, in providing information to our people so they can intelligently participate in their government.

Jack Shafer, who writes mostly about media for Slate, is one of my favorite columnists. His column yesterday is about what Bush has learned about media manipulation from his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jung Il. Not as far-fetched as you might imagine.

Columnist Mike Hedricks of the KC Star is more flippant when he puts the blame for the denigration of the press on Rush Limbaugh and his clones. But there is a smidgen of truth in there, too.

I won’t deny that Dan Rather, Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass and others played right into the hands of those who would bring this plague down upon the journalistic house, but when it comes to getting information about your government, whom are you going to trust? The government itself? There’s a disinterested and unbiased source for you.

I hope I’m not going to make this blog a magnet for fundamentalist Christians, (see the posts from Jan. 31 under the title “Try Flowers”) but I can’t help calling attention to this story from Tuesday’s NY Times.

I read about some recent Gallup Poll data in Editor and Publisher that public acceptance of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is below 50 percent in the U.S. What I’m waiting for is a poll that compares the people who subscribe to creationism to those who believe there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

I’m guessing the groups are close to identical. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice and I’ll vote for you for President?

In the NY Times today was a not-so-startling story about a study done at Harvard finding that an alarming number of people end up in bankruptcy after they get ill and pile up medical bills they can’t pay. The study says that half the people who end up bankrupt do so for medical reasons.

And most of those were regular working Americans who got sick, lost their jobs because they were sick, then lost their health insurance provided by their job, then lost their house and everything else.

This is of interest to us Minnesotans, of course, because of Governor Pawlenty’s proposal to cut the hell out of medical assistance to people who, for one reason or another, can’t afford private insurance.

Aside from the fact that taking people off insurance will have the obvious deleterious effect on their health, what it will really do is just shift the burden of their care to the counties who run the hospitals who have the emergency rooms where they will end up with pneumonia when they could have gone to a family clinic and got some antibiotics for their mild upper respiratory infection last week when they started feeling ill.

Another leading cause of bankruptcy, according to the story, is gambling addiction. Pawlenty’s other big initiative for this legislative session is expansion of casino gambling so the state can get its cut.

Maybe we can use the profits from the gambling for the welfare of the children whose parents we’re offering two wonderful paths to bankruptcy.

Ok, I’m a big Keith Olbermann fan. I have been since his Sports Center days when he once said of a baseball highlight clip, “That’s 6 to 4 to 3, if you’re scoring at home. And if you aren’t, try flowers.” My son, who was watching with me at the time, turned to me. I turned to him. Then we both fell off the couch laughing. Olbermann was damn near that good every night.

I’m not going to go on much more, except to point you to this, Olbermann’s response to the “SpongeBob is gay” controversy. Read the post from his blog, then be sure to click on the link and watch the video of the cartoon rendition of “We are Family” that so offended the Christian right. Be careful, though. As Keith says, watching the video could make you gay, or at least tolerant. And the religious right wouldn’t want you to be tolerant, now would they? That wouldn’t be Christian.