Paranoia

The racism, it stings!

“A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.”

Oh, that was only Europeans.

@Promnight: I noticed that … they’re directing you to the brown people on the other side.

The gubmint didn’t want me to see that video? Well, they didn’t try too hard to keep it from me, did they? And why, exactly, am I not apposed to see it?

And I know looks don’t matter etc., but how come all the people on our side are kind of cute, and they get O’Reilly, Dobbs, Beck, Limbaugh?

Well, SFL beat me in Scrabble again, but I must say in my own defense that, although she got the W, it was not an ass-kicking.

Hey, I found the perfect running mate for Talibunny: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/29/rodell-vereen-sc-man-char_n_247245.html

If the GOP is only going to run psychopaths for public office, they might as well the choicest candidates. This guy is the heart and soul of the party.

Should we campaign to draft him as the GOP VP candidate in 2012?

@Dodgerblue: Counselor Dodger: It was a very close game, I thought you pulled ahead close to the end with your use of the word “JEW” on a 4W square, and it was only my use of a six letter word with X in it on a 4W square that pulled me ahead. How many people lose with a score of 406?! I look forward to a rematch.

They found the CIA torture tapes?

Oh.

@FlyingChainSaw: Who gets charged with buggery? How very Victorian.

I told you he’d be perfect as a Talibunny running mate.

@Mistress Cynica: How very Victorian.

Looked at the video with a sound-enabled computer. Apparently, when the Commies take over all music will be reduced to faux Arvo Part ostinatos on dime-store synthesizers.

Speaking of wingnuttery, two DeKalb Co., Ga. police officers were suspended for performing a criminal background check on the Prez.

DeKalb (pronounced “dee-cab” down here) in metro Atlanta (and where I live) is one of the most libtarded counties in Georgia (also the former home of lefty loonbag Cynthia McKinney), perhaps second only to Clarke County, where the University of Georgia is. It does not compute, but I guess the conservatards are everywhere.

@rptrcub: Did someone ask them to do it, or were they just hooning around on their own?

@FlyingChainSaw: That poor, poor horse.

@mellbell: That was a really disturbing article.

@mellbell: I thought the owner showed great restraint in only holding the guy at shotgun-point until polics arrived rather than just blowing him away. Not like she’d have been prosecuted for it in SC.

@FlyingChainSaw: Que chingao.

@Dodgerblue: Probably on their own. I wouldn’t put it past some of ’em — cops often work outside of where they live, so they could be, like, from dumbfuckia.

@rptrcub: You didn’t go see Tool this week at the Gwinnett Arena, did you?

@redmanlaw: I’m preparing for furloughs, so I’m saving up as much money as I can. I don’t go outside of I-285 unless I want to see my family, which I’m doing more and more these days to combat just generally feeling down.

rptrcub: Side note: is there a good reason for Gwinnett Co. to exist?

Too soon for another IDF post?

http://doubletapper.blogspot.com/2009/07/idf-women_24.html

@rptrcub: Mrs RML goes to work everyday at the newspaper thinking the axe is going to fall. She is actually part of the revenue stream with her special publications work but as a manager has come up with four ways she could be out of a job by consolidation of her job with others and putting a younger/less experienced/less well paid person in that position. Newspaper management being what it is, however, the reporters get slashed while editors and management stay secure to preside over the ruins. Also, a reporter got an in-person death threat in the newsroom today by an irate hippie father of a girl, age 16, who was involved in a crash with a drunk that killed four of her friends. I told her to get the hell out of there and work at home.

@chicago bureau: Gwinnett was why, in August 1977, the J-school dean told us assembled freshmen to come to our senses, get the hell out, and find a better career. And this was before USA Today, never mind cable and the Intertubez. We wuz warned.

nojo: Gwinnett County. That was a joke for rptrcub to turn on. FAIL.

@chicago bureau: Oh, fine. But Gannett Company was still The Death of Us long before the electronic interlopers.

@chicago bureau: Other than to suck up water from the Chattahoochee and provide a supply of repressed homosexuals, not really.

@redmanlaw: There is no way, given the state of American journalism, that I would return to a mainstream newsroom unless I were paid well. And that ain’t gonna happen.

@redmanlaw: Did you see David Simon’s testimony before John Kerry’s committee on laughing at the death of the American newspaper? He took a buyout in 1987 as the Baltimore Sun’s owners were gutting the paper to prepare for sale. Found out later the thing was running at 30% margins. Nice little business in every way. An Australian supermarket chain in the same period was bragging it would completely overtake the entire retail food sector in Australia at 3% (yes THREE PERCENT) margins, drag their competition to the bottom with the and drown the ones who couldn’t breath in that environment. That’s an enterprise with balls and guts and tools and will. Yeah! Three percent! We love it! We’ll do it for THREE PERCENT! Given the technology available today, a newspaper should be little more than reporters living on their beats and ad sales guys. Editors at a daily newspaper should provide institutional memories, ideas for sourcing and bullshit detectors but you don’t need many of them to make a difference in the character of a paper. The smartest thing to come out of Obama’s mouth since he showed up in DC was that Wall Street has got to shrink. The idea that growth is all and that enterprise is about gaming financial instruments to the service of this stupid principle has got to be discredited and dismissed before it destroys every industry in the states. Her paper chain owned, by the way? Been on a buying spree lately?

@FlyingChainSaw: Mrs RML works at a family owned newspaper, The Santa Fe New Mexican. They went from the industry wide 30 percent profit margin of 25-30 percent five years ago to losing thousands a week just staying open and putting out the paper. The late patriarch, fmr Ambassador Robert McKinney, was a cheapskate who kept costs down while his daughter Robin Martin (a very nice woman who people say should probably be pursing her love of geology and gardening on her farm outside of town instead of running the paper) spent freely on a total gutting and refurbishing of the Downtown building and bought a new German press and built a new building for it south of town just when the shit hit the fan. They’d be belly up if they didn’t have the local contract to print the NYT. Mrs RML is sick from the stress and because the profession she cherished no longer exists.

@FlyingChainSaw: David Simon, David Simon, hmmm…

Oh, right. The Wire. Season 5. Where they cover the Sun newsroom. Do more with less, and all that.

Given the technology available today, a newspaper should be little more than reporters living on their beats and ad sales guys.

Case in point (alas): Politico.

There’s apparently also a print edition, and while the joint is operationally lean (with very well-paid reporters), it still hasn’t broke even.

I still have ties with my old college rag (via a board-member friend), and I feel really sorry for those kids, who have to compete with laid-off veterans for fewer jobs. On the other hand, they have the opportunity to recreate the profession as they go — if they can last long enough.

@redmanlaw: Eeek, and the new Mergenthaler is what attracted the NYT contract, or provoked it through a strict Terms of Service requirement for a documented, maintainable, relatively contemporary press? A deal with the devil. The downtown building could be turned into a profitable massage parlor and they could just let the staff work out of their homes and have editorial meetings in local bars. It is a very strange time for that industry. None of the models emerging from the chaos look like they will support a very specialized, highly paid editorial artisan class.

@FlyingChainSaw: I’m glad I got out when I did in 1990 with my George Polk award tucked under one arm and a ticket to law school in hand. It was still fun then and you could kick it old school with technology just becoming available to the profession. It was a hell of an adventure then for a kid off the rez.

@FlyingChainSaw: As my dad (circulation, not newsroom) likes to say, a newspaper manufactures a brand-new product every day.

And there’s the problem: Newspapers as we know them are actually advertising-distribution machines — subscriptions only provide a fraction of the revenue. Every new form of media — radio, TV, cable, Internet — has chipped away at that distribution monopoly, and the high-margin display advertisers long ago switched to preprinted inserts and mailed shoppers.

So you have all this overhead — starting with the press itself — required to maintain a distribution system that is outmoded, expensive, and profoundly inefficient.

That’s why all this has been predictable for the three decades I’ve been paying attention — the Internet may be the final blow, but there were plenty before it. Everyone has seen it coming for a very long time.

And no, I don’t have the solution. Whatever ultimately emerges — and something will — it won’t be the creature we all grew up with.

@nojo: You could kick ass everyday for a week and the boss is still like” so what have you got for me today?” No time to cruise or bask in the previous day’s glory, at least where I worked at back in the day. Apparently the reporters at Mrs RMLs paper like to sun themselves on logs by the river after a big meal and cannot be disturbed for days at a time.

Reporters to each other: “We fill the space between the ads.”

Reporters talking to photographers and designers: “That grey stuff in between the pictures? We do that.”

Reporter talking to photographer: “That lens cost you how much?!? And you paid for it yourself? See this pen? They give these to me.”

Photographer to reporter: “I really hate it when you say that.”

@redmanlaw: I forget where I saw it, but there’s an interesting article out there (New Republic?) about Politico’s operation.

Two rules:

1. Win the Morning.

2. Win the Afternoon.

And that’s that. Yesterday is, how you say, old news.