This is probably just a coincidence — in fact, I can’t come up with a logical explanation for it being anything else — but I thought I’d share it.

Speaking of the WSJ — on the bottom of the page on an inside section front (section B, the “Marketplace” section), I found the story about the conclusion of the Cadbury saga — Kraft won in the end. And it struck me that it was very odd that this story was being played so far back in the paper — and at the bottom of the page, no less!

For months, tiny turns of the screw in this story had merited front-page play — often making the very top of the front page. And now, when we finally learn what happens in the end, it’s relegated to the bottom of an inside section front? This made no sense. I pondered whether the previous day had been the big day and I just missed it, or ignored it, making this an anticlimax … but it still seemed odd.

As I was thinking about it, my eye happened to drift over to the right, and there, in the bottom-right corner, was a Sprint ad with the headline “App Candy.” Mind you, I’m so accustomed to these ads now being on section fronts the last few years that they are white noise to me; I normally don’t see them at all. But because this one had “candy” in the hed, and I was pondering a story about that subject, it jumped out at me.

And the thought flashed through my mind, was the story downplayed like this so it could be played next to this ad?

No freaking way. First of all, I’ve never worked at a paper where there was even a mechanism or a procedure that would have allowed anyone to coordinate such an alignment. And this suggested collusion all the way back to the copy writer at Sprint’s ad agency, which is extremely unlikely even if, under Rupert Murdoch (who finally paid me, by the way, just not as much as I wanted) the editors were willing to do something so unethical as to downplay a big business news story in order to pull such a silly stunt.

And what would have been accomplished, really — other than to make people go “huh!,” then quickly forget about it. I only remembered because I’m a longtime newspaper editor. An increasingly paranoid one, at that, seeing conspiracies in strange places…

Remember when I asked, essentially, where’s the grammar with reference to Joe Wilson’s recent mantra? Well, it was gratifying to see that he has appropriately amended it:

One Year Later, Wilson Continues to Ask: “Where Are the Jobs?” (Washington, D.C.) – Congressman Joe Wilson (SC-02) released the following statement on the one year anniversary of a Democrat-controlled government:

“For 365 days, Democrats have controlled both the White House and Congress.  During this time, the American people heard promises to keep unemployment under eight percent, promises to cut spending, and promises of transparency in the health care debate.  After a year of broken promises, the American people had enough – most clearly illustrated on Tuesday in Massachusetts.

“I encourage Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid to listen to the message the American people are sending them and drop this government takeover of health care and instead take up job creation policies,” said Congressman Joe Wilson.

Wilson’s Speech on One Year Anniversary

###

Don’t thank me, Joe. Once an editor, always an editor. I can’t help myself…

I find myself remembering a scene in “Gettysburg,” the video adaptation of The Killer Angels, in which a couple of Confederate soldiers, asked by a Union officer why in the world they’re fighting, explain with great dignity that they’re fighting for their “rats.” Hearing a reference to rodents, the officer questions them further until it becomes clear that they meant their “rights.” Of course, the scene could easily have gone on descending into the absurd if the officer had then asked what rights they were referring to, and these two poor men, neither of whom would have been likely to own a slave, would have been hard-pressed to come up with an answer that would make any sense to a modern listener — or to the Union officer, who was sort of the stand-in for the modern listener or reader.

It was an appealing scene partly because the prisoner’s explanation, beyond that bit of misunderstanding over pronunciation, was treated with respect. You felt for these guys, just as you feel for Virgil Caine in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” We’re talking about simple men caught up horribly in the nation’s central, pivotal conflict. Yet I still wanted to reach into the screen and shake them and demand that they explain WHAT rights. I mean, look around at all the horror and blood being shed. At the very least, I would expect a better explanation than that.

I find myself thinking of this because I just read this press release that just came out from S.C. Senate Republicans:

SENATE SENDS CLEAR SIGNAL TO WASHINGTON: QUIT STEPPING ON OUR RIGHTS

The South Carolina State Senate sent a strong signal to Washington politicians today when it passed a resolution demanding that Congress quit passing legislation intruding on our state’s and our taxpayer’s rights.  Led by Senate Republicans, a solid majority voted for the bill, sending it over to the House, and requesting that the Attorney General take action on behalf of South Carolina residents to stop a government take over of America’s health care system.

Senate Majority Leader Harvey Peeler (R-Cherokee) said “we cannot continue to sit idly by as Washington politicians continue growing government, bailing out corporations, and passing absurd spending bills. It’s killing our economy. I’m proud of my fellow Senators for standing up and saying ‘No.’”

Resolution sponsor Lee Bright (R-Spartanburg) echoed Peeler’s comments, claiming a great victory for South Carolina’s working families. “Massive spending is costing us jobs and putting too many families out of work. Liberal politicians are spending everything they can beg, borrow, steal, or print. This resolution is more than symbolic, telling the Attorney General to protect our rights from liberal Washington bureaucrats.”

What on Earth are they talking about? What rats — I mean, rights? I mean, if you’re going to make such a dramatic statement, shouldn’t you spell it out? If I were making a grand gesture in which I invoked something so basic and fundamental as my rights, I would feel compelled to go on from there to explain just what rights I meant, and why they were rights, and how they were being taken from me.

But no such help here. And even more absurdly, this claims to be a “clear signal.” And yet it’s clear as mud.

The only part of the release that takes even a backhanded swipe at trying to explain what it’s about — the part that cites “a government take over of America’s health care system” — doesn’t clear anything up; it merely raises compelling new questions, such as:

• What government takeover of the health care system? Surely, surely you’re not referring to that mealy-mouthed, do-nothing bill headed toward a final vote in the U.S. Congress. Surely not. I mean, even if this bill went light years beyond what pathetic little it does, even if it were the single-payer system that we need, it wouldn’t be “a government take over of America’s health care system.” It would merely be a government take over of the insurance system that pays for the health care. Doctors wouldn’t be working for the government; nor would hospitals be run by the government, not in any scheme I’ve seen put forth. It would simply be a far more intelligent and efficient way of pooling risk and paying for the care that we would go out and get from private providers. But you know, there’s not even any point in talking about that, because the Congress never even threatened to do THAT much. Nor would they even provide a “government option” for you to freely choose. Nor would they let those of us 55 and older buy into Medicare. No, instead they came up with this bunch of nothing that for some inexplicable reason you are having an absolute cow over. And again, I ask, what “government take over of America’s health care system”?
• Let’s suppose that there IS such a “takeover,” which there most assuredly is not under any sense of the words Or one of the other things you cite: “growing government” or “bailing out corporations” or “absurd spending.” Please explain in what way ANY of these would be a violation or infringement or abrogation or diminution or whatever of your or my “rights?” How do you figure? Under what philosophical system? Surely not constitutional. Let’s see: Right to free speech? No. Free press? No. Freedom of worship? No. Right to due process? No. Freedom from self-incrimination? No. Unreasonable search and seizure? No…. What flipping rights? And don’t look at me like that, you’re the one who brought up “rights,” so back it up. Is there a “freedom from absurdity” provision in the Constitution that I missed?

These are the guys who are running our state, and this is how they see fit to spend their time. This is how they spent their first week in Columbia, because apparently there are no actual problems in this state that need addressing. I suppose at this point I could go into a treatise about how, when things are falling apart, tyrants and incompetents try to distract the common people with imagined threats from the outside, but I won’t. I’ve already spent more words on this farce than it deserves.

As you probably realize, I read The Wall Street Journal regularly. In fact, my day is incomplete without it. I got hooked when The State was paying for my home subscription. I had a tough couple of months after that ran out, as I waited for the Journal‘s circulation department to cave in and offer me the $99 deal I had heard about from my friends. For weeks, I suffered withdrawal each day as they kept sending me offers at well over $400 a year, but eventually I got the good deal.

So, having waited for it so long, I appreciate it all the more, and spend a good bit of time with it each morning. More time than with The State, in fact, but that’s just because there’s more to spend time with. (The Journal has cut back, too, but it started with more.) And every day, I get a bunch of ideas about things to blog about, but by the time I finish breakfast and get to the office and get settled in and open my laptop and check my e-mail… the ideas are gone. Or I’ve just moved on.

So I thought I would try to reproduce the thoughts that hit me this morning while reading just the opinion pages of the Journal. Or three of them, anyway:

1. Just in case you thought Rush Limbaugh lives only on the radio, check out the column “To Help Haiti, End Foreign Aid,” by Bret Stephens. That aside, I read this one with a willingness to be persuaded, if only because I have an affinity for counterintuitive arguments (see what I have to say on item 3), and because I’m well aware that many efforts to Do Good in poor countries are doomed to end up merely enriching or empowering those who already have power, at the expense of the needy. To me, that’s no reason to quit trying, but I’m open to an argument presenting alternatives. Unfortunately, Mr. Stephens goes out of his way to turn me off to his argument by first excoriating the people who devote their lives to trying to help others. Mr. Stephens is apparently the kind of “conservative” who believes that anyone who spends his life doing anything other than making money for himself is wasting his life. He dismisses NGOs and their workers with the same snotty tone we hear used so often to put down people who devote their lives to public service in this country: “All this works to salve the consciences of people whose dimly benign intention is to ‘do something.’ It’s a potential bonanza for the misery professionals of aid agencies and NGOs, never mind that their livelihoods depend on the very poverty whose end they claim to seek.” There is so much malice in his tone that I have little trust that the evidence he presents for his argument against continuing aid (he grants that it’s fine to help in this crisis; he just despises people who would stay and keep helping when the TV cameras have gone away) as being representative or fully relevant. It would be nice to see a good examination of the limitations in the efficacy of conventional aid — together with ideas for alternatives that have a little more credibility and specificity than vague wishes for “investment” — by someone who actually believes in helping. That might prove enlightening. But this was not.
2. An op-ed piece headlined “The Body Scanner Scam” had a real grabber lede: “All males have a body cavity. Females have two body cavities….” But that’s not why I kept reading. What interested me was that, after presenting some fairly (but not entirely) persuasive arguments as to why physical checks are doomed to fail because of the inadequacy of the equipment or lack of time or terrorist countermeasures, the author went on to present an argument based in the idea of what you might call “positive profiling.” In other words, rather than pick on a given group for special attention, make the system more efficient by positively identifying categories of people who can be waved through safely, making time to devote to scrutinizing everyone else more closely — and to do that with questions, not probes or scans or pat-downs. A neat idea, and a creative way of getting around libertarian and identity-politics arguments against profiling. But face it: If you wave through everybody who isn’t a young man with an Arabic name, sweaty palms and lumpy underwear, you’re sort of singling out the aforesaid young men. And once everyone knows that groups of old people on tours together get waved through, al Qaeda is going to be recruiting granny and getting her a group rate (not easy, but an organization that can persuade young fools to blow themselves up isn’t going to stop trying because of a little recruitment challenge). Personally, I think we should act like we have good sense and scrutinize the aforesaid young shifty-eyed men, and put up with the fact that the shifty-eyed young men lobby will raise Cain about it. But that’s me. Anyway, a thought-provoking piece.
3. Finally, let’s look at the editorial, “Predators and the Constitution.” Normally, I don’t read the editorials in the Journal, because, like the editorials in The New York Times, they are just so predictable and SO party-line. I’m like, “I know what Democrats think about this,” and “I KNOW the Republican talking points,” and so I find their editorials, while well-written, tiresome. (Oh, and if you wonder why I read the Journal and not the Times, the answer is simple: The NYT guy refuses to deliver on my side of the river. Really.) But I read this one, and after going through some gyrations, I agree with it. Basically, it bemoans the idea of the Supreme Court supporting a federal law that keeps sexual predators in the justice system after their sentences end. Now on one level, this is typical Journal editorial board anti-gummint (especially anti-federal), states’-rights, pro-civil liberties, anti-courts stuff, but in this case they’re right. As much as I believe that such predators should stay in the system (because everything we know indicates they will NEVER cease being a menace to society, so if we’re ever going to let them out of prisons or mental hospitals, we should at least keep tabs on them), this IS properly a matter for the states and not the feds (another case of members of Congress wanting to be seen as doing something about an emotional issue, even when it isn’t their business), and such things should be decided by the political branches and not the courts. As the editors note, 20 states have thus far passed laws keeping predators in the system (as they should), and this trend should be allowed to play out without the feds trying to impose it. So, good one this time, editors. (I can already see bud, who cares more for results than proper processes, disagreeing with me on this. Hey, that’s why he’s a Democrat and I’m an UnPartisan.)

And that’s just a taste. So much to think about, so little time for thinking…

Just a few hours after I saw Nikki Haley’s Tweet that said “Help Scott Brown stop the government takeover of Health Care,” which had so many things wrong with it that they couldn’t possibly be addressed in that medium, and which caused me to think, That’s it; I’ve completely lost all my patience with Nikki, I …. where was I going with this sentence? oh, yeah… I ran across this one from Karen Floyd:

From Sen. Lindsey Graham: “Please make telephone calls from your house to support Scott Brown…

And so, rather that pick on little ol’ Nikki, I’ll use Sen. Graham as my example.

Senator, the election in Massachusetts is none of your business. The very idea that you, or Nikki, or anyone else from outside that state should seek to influence the choice of a senator from that state — someone who will represent that commonwealth’s people for the next six years, and probably longer, given the power of incumbency — just so that you can win on one vote on one bill in the Senate, is absolutely unconscionable.

Never mind the fact that you’re wrong on the issue in question. Even if you were right, this sort of meddling would be wrong.

I don’t expect you ever to adopt my attitude — which is that I wouldn’t give two cents to help either party get a leg up in Congress — but at the very least you shouldn’t interfere in a decision that should be purely that of the people of Massachusetts for such a narrow purpose.

P.S. — I was going to link to when we discussed this subject before, but couldn’t find it. It was within the context, I think, of SC partisans being urged to try to influence outcomes in runoff elections or recounts or something in Georgia or Minnesota. Do y’all remember? As I recall, some of you took me to task, because y’all buy into the notion that the all-encompassing war between Brand X and Brand Y dictates that all local politics is national. As an unreconstructed Federalist, I disagree strongly. I don’t want folks from elsewhere messing in our elections, and I don’t want to see folks from here doing the same elsewhere. We’ve got enough problems right here at home.

Lora Prill at ADCO shared with me this pretty hilarious deconstruction of a CNN news story. Here’s the story, headlined “”Credible threat’ from al Qaeda in Yemen,” and here’s the deconstruction, or at least a taste of it:

…I mean the headline was “credible threat” or something, right?  I mean, what is actually being reported in this article?

“The U.S. has some information about time frame, this source continued, saying, “It is more definitive than it usually is.””

I believe that’s the fourth anonymous source using all those vague, unhelpful pronouns.  So, the officials have this on lockdown, or what?

“The U.S. does not have information on location, however…”

Okay.  That’s fine, but, again, what the [expletive] are we talking about?  Aviation still, right?  CNN, are you reporting on measures that have been taken to address this “credible threat”?  Is that what’s going on here?

“This source pointed out that aviation security is rigid already and that no additional protective measures have been taken.”

Hmmmmm.

“But, the source says, “there is a lot of stuff going on in the next day or two” relating to analysis.”

Now what in god’s name does that mean?  A lot of “stuff going on” “relating to analysis”?  I defy anybody to find any trace of information contained in those words.  Seriously, CNN?  “Stuff going on”?  You couldn’t get anything better for an off-the-record quote than there’s ”stuff going on”?  Are there also times in our intelligence community when there isn’t “stuff going on”?  CIA agents just come in to work, stare at a blank wall for 8 hours and call it a day?

Actually, come to think of it, what’s hilarious is the original CNN piece. The mockery isn’t all that imaginative, and it has the distracting element of being written from the paranoid “MSM are shills for the military and the gummint” point of view. The spoofer says “if they published it in seriousness you’d think they existed purely as a propagandist arm of the government.” No, they wouldn’t. Propaganda is more artful than this. And more directed. If this is propaganda, what on Earth is its aim? Laughter? Confusion?

No, what we’re dealing with is gross incompetence, the basic inability to write one’s way out of a wet declarative sentence. And unfortunately, this is something we see too much of in what’s left of the harried, overworked MSM.

One is tempted to dismiss it by saying that the moral of the moral of the story is, don’t ask broadcast folks to write anything. Or to say that this is what you get when a committee tries to write something. This committee, specifically, consisted of Ed Henry, Dan Lothian, Jeanne Meserve and Pam Benson, all of whom are attributed. It’s amazing that even one person was willing to put his or her name on this abomination, much less five. (Which means there are perhaps as many putative authors of this piece as there are anonymous sources, depending on how you count.) Maybe they’re pseudonyms. Maybe those are actually names of people the true writer doesn’t like. Really, REALLY doesn’t like.

But here’s the real explanation: This is typical of what you see and hear on 24/7 TV “news” all the time; it’s just not as noticeable when you don’t see it written out. Basically, the author(s) had some scraps of information, although not enough to put together a coherent picture of anything — but went ahead and blathered aimlessly about it. I understand why this happens on 24/7 TV, because it’s about killing time. What’s really distressing is that too often these days, I have the same “huh?” experience after I read news stories in print.

The whole country’s becoming incoherent. Maybe it’s Twitter. Maybe it’s blogs. I don’t know, but it’s distressing. I mean, OMG and so forth…

Ran into Jim Hodges this morning, and since my man Joe Riley endorsed Vincent Sheheen in his gubernatorial bid this week, I was wondering whether the ex-gov had chosen a candidate.

As you may recall, back when Dwight Drake got into the race, scuttlebutt had it that he did so at the behest of Mr. Hodges and Dick Harpootlian. But at the time, Jim told me no way; that was all Dick’s doing. He did not have a candidate.

This morning he told me that like Riley, he likes Vincent — but he thinks a lot of Dwight, too. He may endorse one of them, but he’s not in a hurry to make that decision. As he sees it, he’s got plenty of time, and he’s not going to rush it.

In the meantime, the candidates are working on him, wanting that nod. Vincent talked with him just this week about it, and Gov. Hodges met with Dwight last week.

As our current governor likes to say, to be continued…

The measure of the catastrophe in Haiti is measurable by the fact that even venues that normally take little notice of the news were advising folks how to help. So it was that this morning, the first thing I heard on the radio was a DJ telling folks how to donate $10 to the American Red Cross relief effort by texting “Haiti” to the number 90999.

That’s one thing you can do, so I pass it on. It’s good to be able to do something. Too often, my own response to such events is to have odd, irrelevant thoughts such as this one:

Why do these things always happen to the very poorest countries?

Haiti was the very first foreign country I ever visited, back in late 1962. You’ve heard of people in the Third World diving from boats to catch coins tossed from cruise ships? Well, at that point in my life (9 years old) I had never heard of it, but I saw it and experienced it. I threw a few coins myself. We weren’t on a luxury liner by any means, just a small combination cargo/passenger ship taking my family to my Dad’s new duty station in Ecuador. At the time, I was fascinated at the skill it took for someone to dive from a small boat and capture a coin far below the surface before it was gone for good. I was like, “Wow! I couldn’t do that!” (although I longed to get down there and try). I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was only later that I was mature enough to think, “My God; what desperation it takes to develop such a skill and practice it — rowing out in the harbor and going to such exertions for such a small return…” And of course, at that point I felt bad about my own role in it, as the “rich” child casting scraps to the poor for sport. But at the time, I was innocent, seeing it as a game, showing off, a demonstration of skill. I actually envied the divers.

That was my initial introduction to the Western Hemisphere’s most desperate nation, one that had never had a chance from the start. When you look at the advantages this country had, with a highly qualified cadre of well-educated people with unlimited resources to found the institutions upon which our republic is based, and you look at the desperate need of that nation founded by slaves, you get an education in the gross unfairness of history.

Then, when that bad hand is compounded by something of this magnitude, you have to wonder why? Is is just that the world’s poorest people have no means to move away from the parts of the world most susceptible to quakes and tsunamis and other calamities? I realize that the extent of devastation is exacerbated by poor construction and the lack of an infrastructure of first responders and such — and some calamities, such as those staggering losses from overturned ferries and such in Pakistan and elsewhere are a direct result of poverty — but it seems like, generally speaking, these more extreme “Acts of God” just don’t happen where rich folks live. Add to that the fact that since 1945 the wealthy countries haven’t even been visited by war (history’s great leveler), and the utter unfairness of the universe is just overwhelming.

I don’t have an answer to this; my mind is thoroughly boggled.

This is a recent file photo, but I'm thinking they looked sort of like this at the doctor's office.

Well, my heart’s breaking this afternoon, because my daughter posted this about the twins (only with their real names instead of the designations I have here):

The two-year check-up this morning was AWFUL. They took a vial of blood from each twin’s foot which took forever and made them scream. While [Baby A] had hers done, [Baby B] hid in a corner and said “No thank you, turn. Turn, no thank you” over and over, but the poor baby still had to take her turn. SO SAD! So many tears!

I’m going to have to go over and hold them for a while this evening.

Just after reading that message, I ran across the picture above from last week, which seems to fit the mood of this post. I think they were fretting about having to leave when they had been having a good time at our house. Normally, these are very cheerful children.