About the General and Rolling Stone

So the national press is all agog today about comments made by Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his flunkies in Rolling Stone about how clueless the Obama White House is about Afghanistan.
Most commentators not named Rush Limbaugh agree that Obama can't let that slide, that the General should get a boot in his ass going out the door. I agree with them, primarily because he should have never let his crew get loose like that in a national publication (or any publication, for that matter).
Let me, however, put this into a little context. McChrystal has never shied from saying that he thinks the U.S. effort in Afghanistan has been mostly half-assed. He doesn't agree with Obama's timetable to start drawing down troops in 2011. He didn't get everything he wanted for the big surge Obama approved last year.
I'm going to go out on a limb and surmise that this isn't just a tactical disagreement. I'm guessing his objections are heart-felt and not at all the fumings of some strutting peacock, as military commanders are typically portrayed by lefties when they disagree with the civilians.
I would imagine that the General is thinking a bit about the young men and women who have already been maimed or killed there. If the U.S. leaves AfPak in the next few years, the region is likely to still be a corrupt Hellhole leaking heroin and Islamic fanaticism. Given that, why did we go there in the first place? To inconvenience the locals and the Taliban for a decade or so? To create even more terrorist training opportunities for the wildly-disaffected young men we have been alienating there? What will the reaction be in the Western press when Al-Jazeera runs video of bin Laden walking freely down some street in Kandahar?
I want to reiterate that McChrystal should be fired. I also agree with Obama's desire to start pulling out next year. But I know and grudgingly accept what most of my fellow Americans don't: We blew it sky high there in 2001-02 when we started moving out assets to prepare that war crime called the Iraq War. We have wasted billions of dollars and ruined millions of lives, both there and at home, because a handful of paranoid pseudo-intellectuals thought they could remake the Middle East in Dick Cheney's despicable image.
I think Obama is making the least bad decisions he can in Afghanistan, but I understand why McChrystal is pissed off and I don't begrudge him collecting speaking fees from all of the corporatists who will surely line up to hear him malign Obama. I don't know if that is his plan, but God bless him if it is. He deserves the money much more than Newt Gingrich or Sarah Palin, as they have spent their lives talking and he has spent his life doing.

Reality check

Hey, long time no blog.
I don't know what I or you expected from Pres. Obama's speech tonight, but it seems to me that he brought what he reasonably could. He can't fix this, really, and he's not the kind of guy to write checks he can't cash.
Let's face it: the Gulf Coast is fucked, the fishermen are fucked and no one at BP, the Coast Guard or even our Nobel Prize winning physicist Secretary of Energy knows how to stop the gusher a mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.
The hurt is just beginning and no one knows when, or if, it will stop. BP is going to lawyer up at some point and go bankruptcy on our asses, long before everyone is made whole.
All I can tell you is to raise Hell with your Senators and Congressmen. Tell them half-assed isn't good enough and stick to that. The least bad solution to helping the Gulf Coast and keeping the economy from collapsing again is Big Government flexing regulatory muscles. Start by soaking Wall Street and the top one percent with much higher taxes, and give out grants to manufacturers willing to make solar, wind, natural gas and biodiesel affordable enough that you and I can buy into them on our pathetic, working class salaries.

PS: I'm heading south of the 45th parallel for good at the end of the month and back to the Circle City, the wife, the kids and the suck job market down there. The North Pole is wonderful, but the day job just won't get me where I need to be. It's been good, but it's time to move on ... again.

Democracy inaction

Ever wondered what the lapsednewsguy looks like? Well, here I am moderating a city council candidates' forum attended by six citizens (out of 6,000 in town), four ushers, the sound guy and six of the seven people running in Tuesday's local elections ... and the pressroom manager from the Tribune, who was good enough to take pictures for me.

Why Goldman Sachs execs should be strung up by their nuts

So the SEC is going after Goldman Sachs over this whole derivatives fraud thing, right? You understand what it was that Goldman did wrong, right?
Nah, me either. The Huffington Post breaks it down so that financial illiterates like you and me can understand it.
Basically, Goldman bundled a bunch of risky mortgages (called a Collateralized Debt Obligation) from areas overdue for a housing crash, sold it to some suckers by claiming that all of the mortgages would be paid off in full and took out an insurance policy that would pay out when the CDO inevitably failed far short of maturation.
This transaction is typical of the crap Goldman and others were pulling for the last several years that put our economy in the toilet. These dickheads knew the White House and Congress wouldn't let them go under because they are Too Big to Fail. And the Bush Administration and Congress predictably ponied up hundreds of billions of dollars of our money to save them.

V

Tonight marked the return of V, or rather the newer, much better version of that iconic 80s sci-fi series. I won't go into all of the reasons why this version is better, but suffice it to say that this one is better written, edited and performed than the old one.
This version doesn't waste so much as a second on extraneous or cosmetic pandering to the viewer. It's dense, but so much so as to be cumbersome or overly complicated. I even like its extensive use of closeups, which normally annoy me, because the actors really use the frames well to communicate (rather than to stand there and be pretty).
One scene from tonight's episode really brought home that point to me. Morris Chestnut's character, a Visitor sleeper agent who turned on the reptiles, knocked up his girlfriend with a Visitor/Human hybrid by mistake. She finds a loaded mousetrap and suddenly gets major cravings for the dead varmint. It suggest the old series without merely repeating the classic scene from the 80s series when Jane Badler wolfs down a guinea pig.
Genius. Pure, understated genius.
It's on ABC Tuesday nights for the next couple of months. If you don't catch it there, go to Hulu.com or buy the episodes on iTunes.

Your Tea Party Founding Father

Former Rep. Dick Armey (R-Tex.) gave up his safe House seat several years to go make millions of dollars on K Street. One of his most notable lobbying efforts is Freedom Works, the astroturfing outfit that financed the birth of the Tea Party movement.
He is also a dumbass.

The truth, whatever that is

My little man was making himself a snack the other night and wrecked the kitchen. He got the fire out before the firefighters arrived and wasn't hurt, thank God. My ire over his carelessness quickly gave way to relief over his well-being. It was an accident and he is okay. Nothing else really matters.
It's a tricky thing, to be honest. He's 17 and couldn't be less like me. His priorities are so far different from mine at that age that I wonder how we could have shared the same home for so long. Sure, I'm just his Step Monster, but I raised him from the age of four. Sadly for Josh, Biological would never think of putting him first. Biological pretended to put Josh's sister first for a while, primarily to get out of paying child support. Jmo got eventually wise to that, much to her disappointment.
Josh and Jmo both have weathered a lot over the last few years, with the wife and I at odds over EVERY FUCKING THING. Those hostilities have subsided, primarily because I'm 500 miles away. Neither of them has an evil bone their body (although they can be real shits sometimes), but I worry about them having tough ways to go in the world.
I wouldn't be a teenager today for all the tea in China. The world is way too loud. Empathy is exploited, not honored. Ignorance is becoming bliss and shallow reaction has somehow become wisdom. Adults throw tantrums to get their way and don't seem to have any shame about it. It's tough enough being grown up and knowing a thing or so; I couldn't bear being a kid trying to figure all of this crap out.
I guess I'm waxing so philosophical because I'm relieved for Josh and looking forward to seeing him in 24 hours. I would love nothing more than to tell him that being honest, turning the other cheek and persevering are all rewarded, but I know he and the other kids his age thinks that's all bullshit. I can't blame them for reaching that conclusion because they see how far lying, slandering, sneaking and screwing others over gets people these days.
Maybe it was always that way and I'm naive. Whatever the truth is, if there is a truth, I guess I'll have to let him find for himself and hope for the best.
See you tomorrow, buddy.

Post script

Oh yeah, if you care at all about Northern Michigan politics, you can hear me hear Monday at 11:30 a.m.

Nearing yet another fork in the road

As the hopeful schmucks who still check this site for updates know, I'm not really a lapsednewsguy anymore. I am a formerly lapsednewsguy who delivers hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners journalism to the North Pole. Or something to that effect.
I started this blog a couple of years ago after what I thought was my last newspaper gig. The business sucks, to be blunt, because while the community newspapers I made my living editing are still very profitable, their distant corporate owners gut newsrooms to make the 20-plus percent margins closer to 30 percent. As a former colleague once told me, "publishers say 'local, local, local' but they only want to pay for 'wire, wire, wire.'" What he meant was AP wire stories are cheaper than local reporters.
Small town newspapering is very rewarding, because you can do justice to local news, as opposed to bigger metro newspapers that can't possibly get to all the stories that matter to their hundreds of thousands of readers. The problem comes when the aforementioned distant corporate managers hack at already too-small staffs at little papers like mine.
I decided not long after I got to the North Pole that I wouldn't do the 60-plus hour thing to compensate for this lack of corporate commitment. I haven't been afraid to settle for good enough at times. That's heresy to most journalists, but I wasn't going to work harder than my corporate masters and I wouldn't (and haven't) compel my newsroom staff (1 FT, 2 PT and one sports guy) to work off the clock as is expected at most small, 5-day a.m. papers. There's no ladder to climb anymore, so what's the point?
Despite those depressing observations, I live in a nice town and work with a great bunch of folks. We do good work (usually) and make a difference for our neighbors. That makes the effort worth it, even if we're all struggling to remaining above poverty level.
The flip side is that we all know there won't be any raises. The bills will continue to go up, but the pay won't. I'm where I'm going to be financially and professionally. I have a beautiful, yet estranged, wife and two beautiful and equally estranged kids 500 miles away. There is an opportunity 400 miles closer to home, but the same financial and professional realities exist. Being closer to the fam would be great, but it would mean less money and less discretion over how I do daily journalism.
What would you do?

Pointing out the obvious

I agree with David Corn mostly here, but I really wish he didn't feel the need to falsely equivocate. Reagan and Bush Jr. were dunderheads, as my late, great maternal grandfather would say.

A new year and the same old shit

Ah, a mostly lazy weekend was just what I needed. The sports guy went on to another business and I've been doing my stuff, plus much of his job. I'm hoping to have a new guy in place by early February, but until them I'm not-at-all lapsednews(or sports)guy.
Being busy at work keeps me from dwelling on my usual distraction of being amazed at how brazenly hostile national Republicans are towards the American people. They are rallying around a clown in Massachusetts whose platform seems to be "If that colored guy is fer it, I'm agin it!" And their chief shill actually talks down donating money to Haitian earthquake out of fear that Obama will use donors' info for his reelection campaign.
The relentlessly obstuse obstructionism of the GOP is starting to pay divends for progressives, however. Obama has proposed surtaxes on TARP recipients and the greedy asshats who run them. Recognizing that taxes can do good and saying it publicly is a good first step toward real economic policy and forces knee jerk Republicans to side with the creeps who ran this country into the ground.
There is also Wall Street's plaything, Tim Geithner, on the ropes. Obama can't go back to the boardroom for Geithner's replacement, given how things are going, and may have to put an almost progressive in at Treasury.
And, to top it all off, Republicans become more and more beholden to the Teabaggers by the day. This is awesome because Teabaggers believe in made up stuff (yes, mouthbreathers, the Constitution does allow for government taxing and spending). They also believe that everyone else (except the coloreds and libruls) agrees with them, which is easy enough to disprove. They lash out at every thing they can think of, none of it sticks and they will stay home and pout in three years when the Republican who kissed their asses the most during the primaries runs away from everything he (Sarah's not running because she's just smart enough to know that a disastrous presidential run would derail her earning power) promised them on his way to getting stomped by Obama.
Oh, and here's a funny show from Jon Benjamin and Sam Seder. Enjoy!

BEAT COPS from Sam Seder on Vimeo.

And Merry Christmas, too

Yes, yes...I know liberals are screaming bloody murder about the Senate health bill and selling out to ass clowns like Liberman and Ben Nelson.
They need to relax. Eric Alterman has a good point about that here.
The bill is headed to conference, were it will be merged with the much better House bill. No, there won't be Medicare for Everyone in the final version, but preexisting condition discrimination goes bye-bye (speaking as someone with a nasty autoimmune disorder, that's a damn good thing). Drug reimportation from Canada is going to get badly needed support from the White House next year, I'm guessing as a result of the insurance and drug lobbies rolling Obama so well on this bill.
The Stupak abortion language is likely to stand, although a return to the Hyde amendment is possible, I guess -- abortion is still legal and accessible in every state. Make Planned Parenthood one of your good causes to support and the insurance problems with Stupak will quietly go away by 2012 or 2014.
I think this whole experience will give Obama the cover he needs to be superpartisan on the stump next year, when he's out raising money for Democrats running against Republicans beholden to the Tea Baggers. After all, you can't be bipartisan when the other party says "NO!" to EVERY FUCKING THING you propose.
Sure, the president's poll numbers are off. That happens when all the cable news nets talk about for weeks on end is how bad you're doing. And he has bent over too far to engage Republicans. And he hasn't reasserted the government's power over Wall Street -- yet.
Consider what's he has done: saved GM and Chrysler, passed the first real healthcare reforms since the 1960s, somewhat reintroduced the notion that the rest of us don't exist to serve Wall Street, injected real money into infrastructure and renewal energy development and greatly rehabilitated the U.S. as a good, serious presence in world affairs.
The Obama you're disappointed in today is not the guy who will seek reelection in 2012. He will run on a record that you won't have much trouble supporting, against an opposition beholden to a minority of voters who insist on believing made-up stuff.
Chill, my friends.
And have a Merry Christmas!