While I certainly don’t have the chops of a big-city daily editor, I have spent some years as a writer, editor and executive editor of national business magazines. I feel like I have some standing to write the following fictional account of how I might envision a certain reporter/editor discussion. With appologies to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

JIMMY OLSEN: Hey chief! I’ve got a great story! You’re going to love it! It’s front-page stuff!

PERRY WHITE: Don’t call me chief. What is it?

OLSEN: There’s this blogger guy, the one that’s been a real pain in the ass. Turns out he’s a pervert.

WHITE: What kind of pervert?

OLSEN: The worst kind, he’s playing on the Internet with little kids.

WHITE: How do you know?

OLSEN: He was convicted of importuning.

WHITE: Who was the kid?

OLSEN: Oh, there wasn’t actually any children involved, it was one of those Internet sting things where a cop poses as a minor.

WHITE: And what did this blogger do?

OLSEN: He set up a meeting.

WHITE: And when he showed up the cops busted him?

OLSEN: Right. He pleaded guilty to the importuning charge, paid a fine, lost his laptop, did some community service and was put on probation.

WHITE: Is he on the sexual predators list?

OLSEN: Well, no.

WHITE: When did this happen?

OLSEN: Four years ago, but this guy is really hot right now. He”s one of the Meet The Blogger guys.

WHITE: Does this guy write about family values and protecting children?

OLSEN: No. He”s strictly political. But a lot of people know his name because he doesn”t pull punches when he writes. Everybody is fair game.

WHITE: Has he attacked others for their past criminal records?

OLSEN: Well, no. But he really tears into politicians for saying one thing and then doing another. He”s made a lot of enemies. This will be a great story! People will eat it up! We”ve got him nailed to the wall, chief!

WHITE: You”ve got shit. Get out of my office. And don”t call me chief!

Well, at least that’s the way I would expect a seasoned editor to respond.

My Soundtrack: Dreaming by Zero 7 on WOXY.

1.
What is one to make of a life given
to putting things into words,
saying them, writing them down?
Is there a world beyond words?
There is. But don”t start, don”t
go on about the tree unqualified,
standing in light that shines
to time”s end beyond the summoning
name. Don”t praise the speechless
starlight, the unspeakable dawn.
Just stop.

2.
Well, we can stop
for a while, if we try hard enough,
if we are lucky. We can sit still,
keep silent, let the phoebe, the sycamore,
the river, the stone call themselves
by whatever they call themselves, their own
sounds, their own silence, and thus
may know for a moment the nearness
of the world, its vastness,
its vast variousness, far and near,
which only silence knows. And then
we must call all things by name
out of the silence again to be with us,
or die of namelessness.

From Given Poems by Wendell Berry.

[Update — 1730 — This was published on Sunday, so it has no bearing on the case of Tim Russo, but the irony is just too good to pass up.

The Akron Beacon Journal’s public editor Mike Needs calls for more transparency for reporters and editors, saying they should reveal political and religious affiliations, education background, media experience, active membership in organizations, and any involvement in causes or campaigns that could have any influence on a journalist’s news judgment.

I wonder how mike would feel about publishing the arrest records of all reporters and editors?

(I did drop a note to Mike to ask him that question. I’ll post his response when I get it.)]

[Update — 0905, 7 June — Snarkoholic’s (now the Constant Observer) Tish Grier offers some insight between transparency and getting naked.]

[Update — 0907, 7 June — Anyone aware of how this story is playing outside of NEO blogospher? Ah, yes, indeed;

Blogger Quits After Newspaper Report

Cleveland’s Tim Russo Stops Blogging: Why?]

For a second time Democracy Guy has gone dark. You can read the reasons why in the final post. I will not be removing the blog from my blogroll because I want to remember that when those in power flex their muscles, the powerless get crushed. Free speech is only a right when we as a nation protect those who offend us.

Perhaps the Pee Dee reporter thought they were following the dictum: Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But probably not.

Bloggers are writing their own feelings on yesterday’s events. Here are the ones I’ve found so far:

Odd

PeeDee moving ahead with plan B

Peace DG, Peace.

Catching Up With the Ohio Blogosphere

Ah, yes the leftie net roots show their worth

Bob Rhubart

The Night They Tore Old DG Down

A low blow

Let me say this about that

Eulogy to Democracy Guy

DemocracyGuy.com goes off the air by George

Skeletons

no appropriate title

Life in Hell: DG Chapter 666

Democracy losing a Guy?

Sixteen Words

(I’m sure there are more out there that I’m missing. Please post links in comments of any that you know of. Thank you.)

There was much that Tim Russo said that I disagree with. And much that I admire him for. I wish him well.

And confusion to his enemies.

My Soundtrack: Hi by Psapp on WOXY.

I suppose I could go see The Omen this afternoon to celebrate 6 June 2006, but the original was good enough for me so I’ll just share this little list that Terry sent me. I was disappointed that the author(s) missed 666666, the number of the Supersized beast and 696 the number of the Sexy Beast.

(I will, of course be cross-posting the Price Of The Beast over at The Writing On The Wal)

666… Biblical Number of the Beast
660… Approximate Number of the Beast
DCLXVI… Roman Numeral of the Beast

Form 10666… Special IRS Tax Forms for the Beast
66.6%… Tax Rate of the Beast
6.66%… 6-Year CD Interest Rate at First Beast Bank of Hell
$666/hr… Billing Rate of the Beast’s Lawyer

Maybe I’ll watch the original Exorcist tonight: the scariest movie ever made.

My Soundtrack: New Years by Asobi Seksu on WOXY.

Salon brings Robert Kennedy Jr. and Farhad Manjoo together to sling arrows of outrageous fortune (sorry Bill) from their Election 2004: Ohio quivers in Was the 2004 election stolen? Kennedy accuses Manjoo of playing a clumsy game of gotcha. Manjoo all but Reaganesquely smirks, there you go again, in response.

Salon is also feeling a certain personal heat. The website made its bones in 2000 by covering the Florida elections, but now finds itself tarred with the same brush readers want to swipe at Manjoo. Joan Walsh goes point-for-point in Salon Answers Its Critics.

Many want to dismiss evidence of fraud in 2004 and get on with our electoral lives. But if we can’t trust our elections nothing else matters. One of my readers and trusted confidants has suggested that it will be in Pennsylvania where the chicanery occurs this time. If those who would sully our most precious right, that of the vote, keep state-hopping, it makes it harder to pin them down.

If Rick Santorum wins in the fall, I’ll take that as a pretty good indicator that the shadow lurkers are still at work.

My Soundtrack: White Unicorn by Wolfmother on WOXY.

(to remind myself)

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill – more of each
than you have – inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditional air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensional life;
stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem hat does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

From Given Poems by Wendell Berry.

…The Cult of Personality. This dichotomy is at the core of the debate raging among those who want to vote None Of The Above in 2008. Alternative-party naysayers want to point out that the only successful third-party bids for the presidency in the 20th century came from charismatic figures. They miss the key point.

Not only did no third-party presidential candidate win election in the 20th century, but the parties of former President Theodore Roosevelt, 1912; Sen. Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, 1924; former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, 1968 and businessman Ross Perot, 1992 all faded away once their leaders moved on.

We have to go back to the only third-party candidate who was elected to the White House: President Abraham Lincoln. President Lincoln was not charismatic, but he was a man of ideas representing a party of ideas. The Republican Party was founded in the 1850s because neither of the dominant parties — the Whigs and Democratic-Republicans — were willing to take on the anti-slavery and free-soil issues.

This is the model for creating a third party: build the platform and then find the people to stand on it. The organizers of Unity08 appear to agree.

We believe that, while the leaders of both major parties are well intentioned people, they are trapped in a flawed system – and that the two major parties are today simply neither relevant to the issues and challenges of the 21st Century nor effective in addressing them.

[Snip]

We have set three specific goals, and are exploring how best to achieve them.

The election of a Unity Ticket for President and Vice-President of the United States in 2008 — headed by a woman and/or man from each major party or by an independent who presents a Unity Team from both parties.

For the people themselves to pick that Unity Ticket in the first half of 2008 — via a virtual and secure online convention in which all American voters will be qualified to vote.

To effect major change and reform in the 2008 national elections by influencing the major parties to adopt the core features of our national agenda. With a group of voters who comprise at least 20percent of the national electorate, we feel confident that our voters will decide the 2008 election.

This last goal troubles me because as I read it, Unity08 is really about holding the middle hostage in order to force the Republican and Democratic parties to modify their own platforms. Within the scope of a long-term strategy, this minimum goal does make sense. It took the Republicans six years and two election cycles before they could elect Lincoln. But I don’t think this fall-back goal should be at the group’s core.

I know that those who think diluting either parties’ base is disastrous — think Wallace in ’68 and Perot in ’92 — and that Unity08 lacks the three most important building blocks for a winning presidential campaign: money, money and money. I am not yet so cynical to believe that ideas are not more powerful than cash. For the sake of our nation’s soul, I would wish it not be so.

My Soundtrack: From A Motel 6 by Yo La Tengo on WOXY.

I do love it when the Universe comes together to make a point. I had just finished reading Dave Barry’s review of Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America By Tom Lutz when the above cartoon popped into my inbox. It was a sign. I knew that my toe-nails had been sorely neglected.

What wonder have you done to me?
In binding love you set me free.
These sixty years the wonder prove:
I bring you aged a young man”s love.

From Given Poems by Wendell Berry.

The Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten delivered the commencement address to the University of Maryland College of Journalism. Weingarten delivered his speech with tongue in cheeks, but there was a lot of truth in what he had to say. In particular, I found this oberservation, in light of the fall of the Akron-Beacon Journal, appropriate.

Two decades ago, I worked with your dean, Tom Kunkel, at the Miami Herald. Back then, the Herald was a newspaper the thickness of the Singapore telephone directory. Today, when carriers fling the Herald onto suburban driveways, it settles to the pavement gently, like a sycamore leaf in the breeze.

When Tom and I worked there, the Herald was the flagship of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, which no longer exists, having recently been purchased by the McClatchy chain, which sold some of the papers to the MediaNews chain, which sold some of the papers to the Kmart chain, which is using them as packing material for Scooby-Doo sippy cups. My point is, and I mean this sincerely, this is a challenging time for newspapers.

Not just for newspapers, Gene. These are challenging times for all writers. Discovering that you may very well have just wasted four years of your life can be a sphincter-seizing moment.

My Soundtrack: Far As The Eye Can See by Radio 4 on WOXY.

Yes, that Bill O’Reilly. The New Republic’s Jason Zengerle compares the statement to Walter Chronkite’s 27 February 1968 pronouncement on the Viet Nam war that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.. President Richard Nixon marked the broadcast as a turning point.

Zengerel, and I, wonder if President George Bush thinks the same of O’Reilly’s?

But Iraq should be a lesson learned. We cannot ever again put American boots on the ground in a hostile Arab country. Iraq was an optional war. There will always be or there were other ways, I should say, of removing Saddam.

Yes Bill, there were. Now why did it take you three years to figure it out?

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

My Soundtrack: Frail And Bedazzled by Smashing Pumpkins on WOXY.

One of the things I’m finding fascinating about the raging debate over Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Was The 2004 Election Stolen? article in Rolling Stone is the rabid response from Democrats. Daily KOS’s Armando Llorens-Sar, a corporate lawyer who represented Wal-Mart, calls the article complete horseshit.

Steven D at Booman Tribune takes exception to Llorens-Sar’s characterization and adds: You want to make the Democratic Party stronger? Censorship isn’t the way to go, sir.

My Soundtrack: What’s Your New Thing? by Walking Concert on WOXY.

…not the problem. From Post Secret.

Cool…

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

From since feeling is first by e. e. cummings.

Farhad Manjoo in Was The 2004 Election Stolen? No. makes a sorry attempt to fisk Robert Kennedy’s Rolling Stone article: Was The 2004 Election Stolen? on Salon. What Manjoo can’t explain, and that is a lot, he dismisses out of hand as silly. I only had to go six paragraphs in to find a whopper.

That report does indeed point out that many people — 26 percent — who first registered in 2004 did not find their names on the voter rolls at polling places. What Kennedy doesn’t say, though, is that the same study found no significant difference in the share of Kerry voters and Bush voters who came to the polls and didn’t find their names listed.

The Democrats’ report says that 4.2 percent of Kerry voters were forced to cast a “provisional” ballot and that 4.1 percent of Bush voters were made to do the same — a stat that lowers the heat on Kennedy’s claim of “astounding” partisanship.

First, the figures are for new registrations in 2004, and as Kennedy points out in his article, new registrations were predominently Democrat. So whatever the numbers, the 4.1 percent of Republicans is going to represent a much smaller real number of voters than 4.2 percent of Democrats.

Second, those two figures only represent those who were able to get provisional ballots, something that a lot of Democrats were flatly denied.

Manjoo only ends up ineffectually pissing on Kennedy’s heat.

At first I was upset with Salon for even giving Manjoo a forum, but in retrospect I think I could almost feel sympathy for Manjoo because Salon has set him up as a strawman.

What do you think?

My Soundtrack: Wishing On A Star by Paul Weller on WOXY.

I had breakfast at Tommy’s this week with John Ettorre and Roldo Bartimole. One of the topics that came up was John’s enthusiasm for Frontline’s The Age Of AIDS. I missed the show because I don’t own a TV, but the whole show is available online with lots of additional references. I’ll be sitting down to watch it this weekend.

The link runs to a Power Point presentation of how our energy policy is bleeding money out of the country. Thirty years ago President Jimmy Carter offered the solution: energy conservation and independence from foreign oil. We ignored his warnings. Do you know of any U.S. cities that look this good? Me neither.

The comment count on the Rolling Stone’s Was The 2004 Election Stolen? over at Buckey State Blog is at 57 and rising. Lots of good insight, but the one that really snapped my attention to comes from Chris Baker at Ohio 2nd. He opines why Ken Blackwell can not only woo Black Democrats this fall, but sweep up an impressive number.

Baker commented:

The funny thing is that Republicans in similar situations fight like hell and come off fine. It boils down to Democrats not having the stomach for the fight.

One of the main reasons why Blackwell is such a factor with Black voters is that the Democrats did NOTHING to fight to protect their votes. The 2004 recounts were the first battle in the 2006 Governor’s race, and the Democrats in power layed down their weapons. A lack of strategic and tactical vision… no will to fight. Please tell me those days are over.

Hopefully they’ll fight half as hard against Blackwell as they did against Hackett.

My Soundtrack: My Only Swerving by El Ten Eleven on WOXY.