It’s been over 20 years since my job entailed dealing regularly, via phone, with editors in the old Knight Ridder Washington bureau, so I guess I forgot what it could be like.
When I was editing the George Will column for today’s op-ed page, I ran across this paragragh:
In January, with much preening, House Democrats embraced "paygo,” the pay-as-you-go rule that any tax cut must be "paid for” by compensatory tax increases or revenue cuts. In December, Democrats abandoned it because of the alternative minimum tax.
Does that make sense to you? It sure didn’t to me. So I called The Washington Post Writers Group, and asked the question, did he mean "’paid for’ by compensatory tax increases or spending cuts?" The first person I asked referred me to another person (which is fine; I hadn’t exactly expected the first person to answer the phone to address the question anyway — he had just sounded like he wanted to try).
The second person I spoke with was one of those people who is unbothered by long stretches of "dead air" in a conversation. A couple of times, while waiting for a response from him, I had to say, "Hello?" to see if he was still there.
After I repeated the question to him, and waited through a long pause, he said he supposed that would be a fine substitution, as it was synonymous.
I could have just let that go in the interest of getting on with a very busy day and enabling folks to go home and start their holiday, but my inner Scrooge asserted himself: Obviously we were miscommunicating.
They’re hardly synonymous, I insisted. "Revenue" is money coming in; "spending" is money going out. It you were going to cut something in order to balance a tax cut, it would have to be the latter.
Another long pause.
Finally, he conceded that he saw my point.
After another long wait, I said, so that substitution’s OK?
Yes, he said.
And then, he added most strangely, "He just meant it in the Washington sense." If there had been irony in his tone, I would have laughed politely. But he sounded so serious, so "you folks in the hinterland wouldn’t understand our insider lingo," that I almost laughed anyway — and not politely.
But I let it go. I had a lot more work to do.
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What did you expect? Do you really want to get stonewalled? If so, ask the credit card companies why they raise rates when the Fed raises rates, but forget to cut the rates when the Fed lowers the rates.
You have watched Ron Paul on TV today. That dude understands Washington speak. He understands that the Federal Government can’t do everything. I don’t agree with him on everything, health care finance in particular, but he does make some excellent points. He is the one person running that gets it right on foreign policy. We are trying to play policeman to the world and folks get very upset about it. What would be a tiny cadre of radicals has turned in to this huge army of angry middle-east folks who do not want us in their corner of the world.
He also pointed out that Isreal, with 300 nuclear bombs, is not in any danger of invasion, especially by Iran. Ron Paul understands that Iran is a hapless military power that is completely incapable of threatening anyone, now or in the future.
And in a shocking display of common sense he even suggested we bring home our troops from not just Iraq and other parts of the middle-east but from Germany, Korea and Japan as well. Kudos Mr. Paul! He points out that with all the savings on these pointless deployments we could easily eliminate the income tax. I would probably do something different with the savings, but the point is well taken: these constant overseas adventures are costing us hundreds of billions of dollars while actually making us less safe.
I won’t vote for Ron Paul because of our differing philosophies on domestic issues, but it is so refreshing to hear the truth about our disasterous foreign policy. Maybe one of the Democrats will pick up on that common sense theme.
Richard’s right. Same thing goes on at the gas pumps, where prices rise with the cost of oil futures, but don’t fall at the same rate. … As for inside-the-Beltway-journalists, I can vouch for Brad’s experience. Talking to them could be surreal — sorta like talking to Dell or HP “customer support” in India. They spoke English but it didn’t make sense, and got indignant if you said so.
I don’t see how any reasonable person can argue with the fact that the US government is being run from “K” Street, and the logical conclusion to all of their desires is a government completely unaccountable and incomprehensible to the average American.
Look at own system. It is unaccountable and opaque. Whether a governor’s cabinet agency or commission run, no one “really” runs these agencies as much as they exist on their own, with their own agenda which is to serve the commission/ governor/ employees first and the taxpayers last.
So the governor receives millions of dollars in undisclosed contributions and no one seems to care. The speaker of the house is being broadcast around the state on PR ads paid for by a liquor and beer company and while it is legal, no one raises the point that it might be unwise for him to accept such an opportunity while he is preparing to run for governor. And don’t even get me started on the state senate…nor the Ethics commission that has quietly made it very difficult for anyone to go online and look at past election cycles so that disclosure is a reality, not just an idea.
So with a 4th estate focused on the trivia of national politics and the latest starlet to use cocaine, our government is falling apart. Many spend countless hours affixing blame, but few will aggressively investigate and report the fraud, incompetence and waste that IS our government. If the people of SC truly knew what our state government was like, change would come. But for the press to simply parrot the governor’s intellectual ramblings about structure and ancient documents takes it from the realm of action to the LaLa land that he inhabits. And we know that land is the land of failure.
Brad, I thought about that apparent discrepancy, and decided that it meant that since they’d decided not to implement the minimum tax this year (since it had not been indexed to inflation, and was now causing problems for the middle class) and since they almost certainly could not get this administration to raise or implement another appropriate tax, that they could not balance income with outflow this year unless they wanted to junk some other plan (maybe one of their ‘earmarks’? God forbid that they might do that!).
Victor … I don’t disagree with you about what the media should be doing in a perfect world, especially in regard to investigative journalism. I can tell you from experience, as a former newspaper journalist and editor, some of the reasons why it doesn’t happen, at least not with the kind of sustained commitment that you and others seem to expect.
1. News is a business, not a public service. That’s Journalism 101. No media company can make a difference if it is not profitable. In today’s world of analyst and shareholder expectations, that means growth in annual earnings — even if your industry is dying. I was at The State when Knight-Ridder purchased it from the founding families. We went from 10% average annual profitability, to an expectation of 30% or more — as a starting goal with KR. … That KR turned out to be incompetent as a business entity that eventually sold out to McClatchy, speaks of harder times to come. McClatchy is known for its strict attention to the bottom line, not for journalistic commitment. To their credit, at least they’re still around.
2. In the case of newspapers, no other medium has a history of spending more on news-gathering, or of earning less in return. That must change if newspapers are to survive.
3. Investigative journalism is risky and expensive. Months of work, or more, can be invested with little consequence or result. It takes experienced journalists (who leave the business because of low pay), resourcefulness, insider direction, and luck to produce solid investigative reports that make a difference. The risk is high, especially when lawyers get involved, and the reward is minimal, at least from a business perspective.
4. As a business, it’s far more cost-efficient to pay inexperienced reporters to crank out daily stories. A newspaper is a voracious beast that demands daily feeding. It takes a lot of people and costs a lot of money to produce “news” of any value, even the wire service tripe about celebrities that audiences demand. In fact, wire service expense is second only to staff.
5. Traditionally, radio, TV and now the Internet, have capitalized on the expense newspapers incur gathering information. They “rip and read” that news with the benefit of ad revenues taken from newspapers, to their greater efficiency and profitability. A paper like The State may employ 3-5 times more people than a TV station regarded as “comparable” in audience reach and frequency, which determine advertising rates.
6. News is the content that compels people to suffer ad exposure, which is where the money is. For the most part, that means journalists are just red ink on the balance sheet. The fewer reporters and editors you employ, the greater the cost-savings. It’s a delicate balance, but there is little or no business incentive to invest in the “glamor” expense of investigative reporting, beyond the occasional prizes or prestige which may (or may not) result.
Just the other day I read where the AP and McClatchy are gain considering “regional” consolidation of editing staff for their operations. In NC-SC alone, that could mean one staff editing reports for six or more daily newspapers — a bean-counter mentality if ever there was one. If this happens, expect even less truly local news. Which, of course, makes no sense, because local news is the franchise that gives these businesses value in the first place.
The Watergate era has passed us by forever. Web-based initiatives such as “citizen journalism” projects that encourage public involvement in the watchdog activities formerly expected of news media are a far more likely future.
In that regard, it’s helpful to remember that journalists have no special powers when it comes to demands for public information. Freedom of Information Acts put press and public on equal footing in many regards, and we do have the media to thank for that.
In Victor’s short list of scandals he left off the Health and Human Services secret slush fund of $70,000,000 dollars, a certain house member’s complete inability to state where hundreds of thousands in grant money has gone, and Mark Sanford’s new accounting system that has cost between 30 and 40 million dollars to create, and is grossly behind schedule and is thought not to work properly at all…and lest we forget about the $51,000,000 squandered in the computer mess…and do I need to continue?? Carol Fowler and Company should be having a field day but there is just too much money floating around for everyone, even Democrats, to object.
Whine, whine, whine …
Ask not what the media can do for you, but what you can do for the media. If you know so much about what is “really going on” and expect others to do the work of fixing it for you, you could at least help by:
— Telling reporters what you know and how to PROVE IT. That’s the hardest part. A little help from people with proof can make all the difference.
— Paying for publications that actually employ reporters instead of getting your information for free and second-hand on TV, radio, and the web.
— Voting against politicians who promise to make your life easier by lowering taxes and increasing public services, or increasing corporate taxes that result in consumer price increases. There’s still no such thing as a free lunch.
— Demanding legislation that controls or eliminates special-interest campaign contributions. Dump the pols who take money and make money from their so-called public service.
In other words, get off the couch and get involved. Hell, even when media do report abuses by government and our elected officials, the silence is deafening.
The media aren’t to blame for our national laziness, shallowness and selfishness. That starts at home.
I should add that Victor’s got the restructuring thing sort of backward. If there’s a parrot in the room, it’s the governor. He’s kind of a johnny-come-lately to the cause, and his words on the subject have little meaning, because he never manages to work with the Legislature to further the cause one iota.
Except … wait, I have to take that back … except last year. Going into the last legislative season, he had all the cards in his hand to at LEAST get DOT properly restructured. He chose THAT moment, with all the juice he needed to get true reform, to start out with his OPENING position as being such a compromise that it would fall short of what was needed. And of course, lawmakers did much, much less. By the end his position was so week that the folks invested in the status quo at DOT were going to the State House to say NO reform was needed at all, and people were actually listening.
All the times that he’s been such an ideological obsessive and refused to deal when he didn’t have the cards on his side, and this time he decides to deal before he has to. So what we got was predictable.
Journalists enable politicians to get away with such shenanigans by passing along whatever doublespeak is handed to them in press releases and press conferences. Seldom due they confront propaganda nonsense. Most of the time, they agree with it, as evidenced by how many editorials and columnists use the same bogus terms and echo the same statist bromides.
The few radio talk shows and conservative TV pundits who dare to laugh at the naked emporer, are treated like lepers by the mainstream lapdog press.
Gordon,
Condescension rarely wears well. On a former news man it is exceedingly grating.
The items I mentioned are certainly common knowledge in certain circles, and rather large circles they are. Please note Brad did not feign surprise, as I am sure he is aware of these items, and many more. The items Victor mentioned fall in the same category.
We mere mortals do not have access to outlets such as the State. If so, we would not be crying in the wind, as we are now.
Lee brings up several interesting points, not the least of which is the notion that the press enables politicians to seek their lowest level. Case in point: Has any member of the press asked the governor, in public, why he has several million dollars of unregulated, undisclosed money sitting in nonprofits? Have they asked why out of state rich people send Governor Mark Sanford very large checks (6 figures are not uncommon)? Do any of the people giving those large checks have financial interest that can be affected by the Governor or his associates?
I know Brad has a difficult job. Probably far more than I realize. But in the end a newspaper is about service, and what great service can a paper have than insuring that government be honest, transparent and accountable.
Randall … no condescension was intended, so I certainly expressed myself poorly, and probably not for the last time. So, another try, with advance apology, if I fail again …
I am not so much defending the media as lamenting how the news business has become more accountable to shareholders than to communities served. That circumstance bears directly on your complaint. This is not Brad’s doing, nor is it a discussion topic in most newsrooms, where good people do their best each day with available time and resources. It is more a matter of what is NOT provided by management, whose creed is to “do more with less,” an oxymoron coined by MBAs with little or no appreciation for the value of those good people or their personal commitments to service.
I never met a journalist who was on the job to make money, much less advance a personal agenda. The idea is so foreign that they don’t even know how to defend against the accusation.
Instead, their job means covering the required beat every day, hoping not to miss anything of significance, then making time to do the extraordinary, if they can sell the larger idea to management. Few newsrooms employ staff specifically for investigative reporting, despite Hollywood portrayals to the contrary. The burden usually is placed on reporters to justify time spent on investigative work, at the expense of required beat coverage, or even on their own time. In other words, it is not a priority in the normal course of business, and is becoming even less so as the industry struggles to meet shareholder expectations. (Even if that awareness is relatively non-existent among the rank and file.)
Under those circumstances, many reporters still willingly work the extra hours without pay and forgo personal time with family and friends to tackle the larger story. They do that on their own, or with the help of an editor who also agrees to “make the time” out of his or her personal schedule.
If media companies are truly about service, as you say, the commitment for higher journalistic enterprise need come from the top. It should be a business commitment, not just lip service to readers. In my experience, as a newsroom manager under corporate ownership, the message from the top was all about budgets and cost-cutting, not journalism. That contrasted dramatically with previous family ownership, which certainly had its failings, but driving profits for shareholders was not chief among them.
As for those who berate “the media” for not doing more with less, I’m suggesting that everyone has a voice — not just those who work in the media. In my news career, I heard regularly from people with first-hand knowledge of abuse in government or elsewhere, whose offers of help or direction usually started and ended with “If you were any good at your job …” Their expectation that the press should somehow divine where to look and how to prove their complaint, while they sat on the sidelines, seemed to me an abdication of personal responsibility as a citizen.
Everyone has a voice and a vote. Your call of complaint to an elected official probably has more weight than a reporter’s request for interview. If as many people called politicians to complain as write or call the local newspaper to badmouth performance, our country would be a very different place. Whatever magic you might associate with the media, it is nothing compared to the power of unhappy voters who take the time to make themselves heard.
So, if you’re looking for the media to make this a better world, OK. The good ones are trying. But it would be even better if folks viewed the media as partners in change, rather than incompetents with a personal agenda or axe to grind. And it would be even better still if you believed your own voice was as strong or stronger than the local newspaper’s — because it is.
The press by itself does not enable politicians to seek their lowest level. We all have a hand in that. We are all mere mortals, as you say.
Randall … no condescension was intended, so I certainly expressed myself poorly, and probably not for the last time. So, another try, with advance apology, if I fail again …
I am not so much defending the media as lamenting how the news business has become more accountable to shareholders than to communities served. That circumstance bears directly on your complaint. This is not Brad’s doing, nor is it a discussion topic in most newsrooms, where good people do their best each day with available time and resources. It is more a matter of what is NOT provided by management, whose creed is to “do more with less,” an oxymoron coined by MBAs with little or no appreciation for the value of those good people or their personal commitments to service.
I never met a journalist who was on the job to make money, much less advance a personal agenda. The idea is so foreign to most that they don’t even know how to defend against the accusation.
Instead, their job means covering the required beat every day, hoping not to miss anything of significance, then making time to do the extraordinary, if they can sell the larger idea to management. Few newsrooms employ staff specifically for investigative reporting, despite Hollywood portrayals to the contrary. The burden usually is placed on reporters to justify time spent on investigative work, even on their own time. In other words, it is not a priority in the normal course of business, and is becoming even less so as the industry struggles to meet shareholder expectations. (Even if awareness of that issue is relatively non-existent among the rank and file.)
Under those circumstances, many reporters still willingly work the extra hours without pay and forgo personal time with family and friends to tackle the larger story. They do that on their own, or with the help of an editor who also agrees to “make the time” out of his or her personal schedule.
If media companies are truly about service, as you say, the commitment for higher journalistic enterprise need come from the top. It should be a business commitment, complete with resources necessary to do the job, not just lip service to readers. In my experience, as a newsroom manager under corporate ownership, the message from the top was all about budgets and cost-cutting, not journalism. That contrasted dramatically with previous family ownership, which certainly had its failings, but increasing profits was not chief among them.
As for those who berate “the media” for not doing more with less, I’m suggesting that everyone has a voice — not just those who work in the media. In my news career, I heard regularly from people with first-hand knowledge of abuse in government or elsewhere, whose offers of help or direction usually started and ended with “If you were any good at your job …” Their expectation that the press should somehow divine where to look and how to prove their complaint, while they sat on the sidelines, seemed to me an abdication of personal responsibility as a citizen.
Everyone has a voice and a vote. Your call to an elected official probably has more weight than a reporter’s request for interview. If as many people called politicians to complain as write or call the local newspaper to badmouth performance, our country would be a very different place. Whatever magic you might associate with the media, it is nothing compared to the power of unhappy voters who take the time to make themselves heard.
So, if you’re looking for the media to make this a better world, OK. The good ones are trying. But it would be even better if folks viewed the media as partners in change, rather than incompetents or worse. And it would be even better still if you believed your own voice was as strong or stronger than the local newspaper’s — because it is.
The press by itself does not “enable politicians to seek their lowest level.” We all have a hand in that.
Thanks Gordon…I aprreciate what you have said, and the spirit in which it was intended.
R
Brad, Gordon, Bud, Karen, Lee, Randall, Victor, Richard and everybody else, whether you see things my way or not,
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
May all your troubles be inspirations.
Best wishes to you as well, Weldon, and to all a Happy New Year.
Yeah, spending equals revenue like NAFTA equals more and better jobs for Americans. Also like devastating our industrial production base by out-sourcing is good because we are all going to get “high tech” jobs – you know, the same jobs they then sent to INDIA after suckering American families into borrowing money to educate their children for those same jobs. Kind of like the myth that we are short of labor in this country when we have American law firms giving seminars on how to LEGALLY AVOID hiring AMERICANS! Kind of like asking American taxpayers to cough up BILLIONS for “homeland security” while the door to Mexico remains wide open.
We collectively have the biggest bunch of liars and thieves in the western world concentrated in Washington DC being controlled by multi-national corporations.
I hope the voters will give a number of these liars and thieves their walking papers in 08!
Everyone must reminber that the socialist goverment that we have now is not really Democrat or Republican. It is give the people who do not want to work and take from the middle class in the form of penalties(TAXES).When people know that they can elect politicans that will give them free things, then they will vote themselves into SLAVERY.
Merry Christmas to all!
I enjoy seeing what all of you have to say, and I hope to be reading more in the new year! Meanwhile, have a wonderful Christmastide!
Randall … Thought you might find this interesting, from McClatchy’s 2007 Q3 report to shareholders and stock market analysts. It offers some insight into the environment where Brad and other journalists at The State work. McClatchy also owns the Charlotte Observer and Myrtle Beach Sun News, among others in our region.
First, the words “journalism” or “news” do not even appear in the formal report, which gives some indication of their priority in the larger scheme of things.
During the third quarter of 2007, McClatchy generated $23.5 million in profits for shareholders.
During that same three-month period, it cut operating expenses by $38.4 million, which was the only way to generate profit for shareholders on ever-declining ad and circulation revenues. Here’s some of what the reports says on that subject:
“Compensation costs were down 3.6%, salaries declined 5.1%, and FTEs were down 6.6%.”
FTEs is jargon for real people employed, or “full time equivalents.”
The report goes on to say that no layoffs occurred, they just don’t replace people who quit or leave, which is basically a hiring freeze.
So, they had fewer people, paid them less, and total experienced staff continues to shrink without replacement. This has been a trend for the past 20+ years, since sale of these papers to corporate ownership, where shareholder interests come first.
More than 200 people worked in The State’s newsroom in 1987. The immediate goal on sale of the paper then to Knight-Ridder was to reduce newsroom staff by half, an effort continued today by McClatchy, Gannett, Murdoch, and other companies that control the majority of America’s daily newspapers.
So, when you hear Brad talking about working until 10pm, or wonder why the reporters downstairs aren’t covering more news in-depth, this may help you to understand what I was trying to explain about doing “more with less.”
I’m sorry to hear that the newspaper business is going the way of the non-profit agencies (state or otherwise) who care for the helpless, and those with chronic or acute disabling problems (medical or otherwise), that is the “do more with less.” It doesn’t work that way, ultimately, as I’m sure you know. Either things don’t get done, or fatigue errors occur. Good people, who really care about what they do, get burned out and quit. People who aren’t directly involved seem to think that these jobs are not important, but when they aren’t done, we get Parris what’s-her-name, the crime- of-the-day, and it-snowed-and-people-had-wrecks, instead of news. In the non-profit areas we get homelessness, deaths that should have never happened, and lost, miserable people who continue to be unproductive unstead of becoming able to live productive lives. It has gone on too long.
That’s an interesting comparison, Karen. People have always viewed newspapers as a public service with special responsibilitiy to the public. Randall suggested something similar, and now you’re relating journalistic responsibility to that of human services agencies.
Imagine if DSS were not funded by our tax dollars. What would happen if DSS had to profit from service fees plus advertising delivered to clients — in a world where clients could get free ads and free human services elsewhere — while DSS stock owners clamored for quarterly return on investment?
I think it’s fair to say that (no matter how humorous the analogy) DSS would fail, unless it could find ways to deliver competitive client services paid for entirely by advertisers. In the meantime, DSS and the people it serves would suffer.
That’s sort of what’s happened to the newspaper industry, whose answer to lost adverting revenue has been to chop away at newsroom personnel, rather than invest in journalistic service and electronic distribution, which would grow audience and advertisers.
The shame of it all is this: As newspapers decline in journalistic commitment to communities they serve, they lose value to the public, giving advertisers and readers good reason to abandon them. The downward spiral has been driven by their own short-sightedness — and servitude to shareholders.
Fifty years ago, the vast majority of America’s newspapers were still owned by the families who founded them. Those families were connected to and invested in the needs of communities where they lived and worked. Generations thrived on what, by today’s standards, were relatively modest profit margins. In hard times, they could even afford to ignore profit growth or subsidize losses out of past years’ gains.
But as the number of heirs to those family newspaper fortunes multiplied over time, personal involvement declined and, eventually, succumbed to individual greed. The time came to dump great-grandpa’s business, cash-in and sell-out for huge profits on grossly overvalued companies. That left those companies with huge debt and a need to “re-capitalize” shareholder investment, which could only happen through cost-cutting and price increases. … Such was the corporate takeover of America’s newspapers, proving once again that not all industries are better served by public ownership.
On today’s stock market, investors demand quick returns and have no stake in communities served, other than profits drained. At the very top, corporate managers are judged by how little they spend and how much they profit. If profits fall, investors go elsewhere and the managers are replaced with more effective profit-producers.
There is no real measure of a national newspaper company’s service to its communities, other than profitability, which derives from the money we spend on subscriptions, and the support we show their advertisers.
If we are fed up with the decline in service, people in one-newspaper towns have few choices: complain, boycott, or go elsewhere for our news.
Some people complain, but most vote with their feet and go elsewhere. In the meantime, good people like Brad fight a valiant but losing battle. His blog is actually a bright spot in the future direction of newspapers, but that’s another topic altogether.
You’re right about the blog. On a larger scale, when society is unwilling to invest money in any given service, well, it gets what it pays for. And this is a very selfish society, from people who are determined to keep their monster gas guzzlers (sacrificing the rest of the world on the holy altars of either ‘individual rights’ or ‘safety’), to those who think they have the right to do whatever they want with what they own (hey, I think I’ll build a vulture feeding station on my property–won’t the neighbors love it!). The pity of it is, if we would, as a country, consider what our priorities are, and work toward them, we might just achieve something. Or maybe our priorities are making the rich richer, and keeping up with whats-her-name.
Karen … you’re right on target about societal selfishness and how it’s changed us as a nation, especially when compared to the attitudes and values of our post-WWII and Depression-era parents or grandparents. Maybe that’s why Brad keeps going all nostalgic on us with 1960s and JFK stuff.
I remember laughing at Al Franken’s “what about me” bit on SNL almost 30 years ago. It’s still funny, but sad when considered in the context of a cultural progression that now elevates rich trash like Paris Hilton to celebrity status.
Franken seems even more on-target today, considering his me-first humor was broadcast just a month after Ronald Reagan declared his candidacy for president with a curse on those “unidentifiable experts who rewrite modern history in an attempt to convince us our high standard of living, the result of thrift and hard work, is somehow selfish extravagance which we must renounce …”
SNL skipped straight to the chase, leaving out the “thrift and hard work” stuff:
Jane Curtin: Well, the 1970’s are in their final month, and with some thoughts on this decade and the one we’re about to enter, here’s Weekend Update’s Social Sciences Editor Al Franken.
Al Franken: Thank you, Jane. Well, the “me” decade is almost over, and good riddance, as far as I’m concerned. The 70’s were simply 10 years of people thinking of nothing but themselves. No wonder we were unable to get together and solve any of the many serious problems facing our nation. Oh sure, some people did do some positive things in the 70’s – like jogging – but always for the wrong reasons, for their own selfish, personal benefit. Well, I believe the 80’s are gonna have to be different. I think that people are going to stop thinking about themselves, and start thinking about me, Al Franken. That’s right. I believe we’re entering what I like to call the Al Franken Decade. Oh, for me, Al Franken, the 80’s will be pretty much the same as the 70’s. I’ll still be thinking of me, Al Franken. But for you, you’ll be thinking more about how things affect me, Al Franken. When you see a news report, you’ll be thinking, “I wonder what Al Franken thinks about this thing?”, “I wonder how this inflation thing is hurting Al Franken?” And you women will be thinking, “What can I wear that will please Al Franken?”, or “What can I not wear?” You know, I know a lot of you out there are thinking, “Why Al Franken?” Well, because I thought of it, and I’m on TV, so I’ve already gotten the jump on you. So, I say let’s leave behind the fragmented, selfish 70’s, and go into the 80’s with a unity and purpose. That’s what I think. I’m Al Franken. Jane?
We might all be better off if we got together and thought about what might be best for any one given person, rather than each person going off in his/her own direction. What say we spend the next few years thinking about what’s best for any given child born today. Then we might get something done.
Ms. McLeod,
You do not seem to understand the basic truth that you and I are incapable of deciding what is best for anyone else, except possibly for our own small children.
Most of the misery in the world is caused by liberals, socialists, dictators, kings, princes, and religious leaders thinking their subjective tastes are so superior that they have a right to impose them on their subjects.
America is based on the realization that subjective decisions are only rightfully made by individuals about themselves. If two or more of them want to voluntarily get together and reach enthusiastic agreement on joint action, that is fine. Anything else is not only immoral, but the least efficient means of economic allocation of scarce resources. That is why socialism is not only brutish and miserable for the workers, but less wealthy and healthy.