Folks, I’m on vacation, in case you wonder where I’ve been. It’s a bit of a hassle to find time to sit before a laptop. But here are some things to chew on:
- New Sanctions Will Force President’s Hand on Russia — Let’s lead with something actually important, shall we?
- Ryan says he’s willing to negotiate on Senate health-care bill, boosting repeal effort — I’ve got an idea: Why don’t all of you people, in both chambers, go home and find something useful to do with your lives, instead of straining so tirelessly to make the nation a worse place?
- Scaramucci in furious, foul-mouthed attack on White House rivals — This has gone far enough. The president needs to sit him down and say, “You don’t do the crazy. That’s my job.” You may also want to read Chris Cillizza’s “Anthony Scaramucci’s absolutely bananas quotes to the New Yorker, ranked.” How does Trump find these people? Do they all belong to a club or something?
- Kevin Bryant considers running for governor — Here’s what I want to know: Why do people who would obviously be worse governors than McMaster keep talking about running? Wouldn’t it be great if for once we heard about a candidate who would be better than, or at least as good as, Henry?
- I wish I could figure out what these guys are doing — I mean, I know what they’re doing is trying to renourish the beach at Surfside. I just can’t figure out how. There are these two fixed platforms about half a mile off shore. There are three or four tugboats puttering about them and a barge. There are these two freighters that keep standing off and on — running out to sea several miles, then steaming back toward the platforms. So far I’ve been unable to figure out the process. Anyway, maybe when they’re done with the sand, they can fix the broken pier. No, they still haven’t done that.
Maybe when they’re done with the sand, they can fix the broken pier.
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Is there a pier in the picture? 🙂
Yes. Lovely picture of the “pier.”
I don’t see anything wrong with that structure.
You should go look for sharks teeth where the dredge dumps onto the beach. I Found a good one on Holden Beach where they had recently renourished. Maybe the platform is the dredge apparatus and the boats drag the end of the pipe around under the water to suck up new sand. I have no idea. Just guessing.
To Scout. My family just got back from Holden Beach, and the renourished mounds were right in front of our rented house. This in effect pushed the ocean back a little bit. On a similar note, a side-caster dredger is working the Lockwood Folly inlet to open the channel for boats. Capt. Pete’s shut down offshore fishing until the channel is cleared. (I don’t know why their boat couldn’t turn and go out Shallotte Inlet, but I did not ask).
2. Three Republican senators crossed the aisle and voted against skinny repeal. Our own Lindsey Graham made a complete partisan ass of himself by talking about how awful the bill was then voted for it. Apparently he was hoping the House would somehow magically fix this mess. Graham wins the prize for “profiles in cowardice” with his mealy-mouthed, nonsensical logic on this. I hope the voters will finally get the message on this terrible excuse for a senator and get rid of him. But the voters are actually the problem so that is unlikely. But one can hope.
1. Some European governments are threatening counter-sanctions against the US’s newly passed Russia sanctions. This stems from the (unintended?) side-effects they may have on the supplies of natural gas Europe receives from Russia. Some there believe the potential negative side-effects aren’t unintentional, and are instead aimed at giving US-produced liquid natural gas an advantage on the European market.
In other news, 49 GOP senators voted for a bill widely considered among themselves (see Lindsey Graham’s opinion of it; though he seems far from the only one) to be an abomination and an affront to their chamber’s leadership responsibility. It was. On both counts.
This is what happens when you lie – eventually you get caught. That never ends well.
The ironic part is that they prostituted themselves to a pledge their voters really didn’t even want them to follow through on. So afraid of the rabid few they lost touch with the reality that it was all hyperbole. The GOP should count its lucky stars that this trainwreck did not pass. If they have any sense about them, they will turn to strengthening and improving the ACA; that will win them votes in the upcoming elections. Stripping healthcare coverage from millions of their own voters wasn’t ever going to work out well for the GOP.
As close as they are, Lindsey Graham surely knew that John McCain would save the U.S. from the consequences of his “yes” vote. So, while Graham’s vote for a bill he knew to be awful is inexcusable, he was playing with catastrophic fire less than the surface appearance would suggest. On the other hand, McCain could have shut the farce down earlier, since his speech made it clear that he realized that it was not just healthcare but the sound functioning of our government that was at risk.
And who carried the water for this one? Two Republican women – despite being threatened and ridiculed by trolls from their party.
I’m going to take the most charitable tack here and say that Graham deferred the moment to McCain since the roll-call vote is alphabetical. However, had Murkowski not held, that would have been a colossal abdication. Graham had to have known that had the skinny bill gone to conference it would have been highly likely that even if the House gave a sporting attempt at modifying its bill the naked reality was that in the end Ryan would be forced to send the Senate’s bill on to the President. If the House Speaker constrained himself to the “Hastert Rule” (it’s a bit staggering that the GOP operates under a principle named after a pedophile but that’s another story) he would have to defer to the Freedom Caucus – which would lead nowhere, just as occurred in the Senate. So voting for that which Graham stated was absolutely not an acceptable outcome was problematic at best.
It would have been far better if the GOP Senators not in support of that unfolding national nightmare had simply voted their convictions – and banded together as a significant dissenting block. Everyone knows there are deep, deep fissures within the GOP – they aren’t hiding anything pretending that they are a unified majority. It’s time both chambers marginalize their hard-right flanks. The GOP will only continue to circle the drain if the party does not stand up to the nonsense they generate.
agreed
Are Scaramucchi and Trump actually twins who were separated at birth?
Apparently, yes.
Does that suggest that boorish, vulgar narccisstic petulance may have a genetic factor, Lynn? Or maybe these two got a double dose of a particularly sleazy genome?
It may be hard to believe but not every man talks like he lives in Mayberry or has the vocabulary of Wally Clever.
Both men and women can be verbally pretty obscene/profane. But only uncivilized boors do so in interviews with a writer from the New Yorker. I thought Priebus showed a lot of professionalism when he announced resignation today. Whatever he may have felt, he was gracious, which only made Scaramucchi and Trump more obviously vulgar and unproffesional.
And yet most of them manage to not be vulgar, crude, and profane daily when speaking on the job.
Most. But not all.
I thought maybe it was because they are New York businessmen.
So was Bernard Baruch, but then he was born in SC, which makes all the difference.
Scaramucci, Scaramucci, will you do the fandango?…
It’s not the words that bother me, it’s the meanness behind them. The darkness and selfishness in Trump’s soul flows through his words. The lack of discipline and respect both men exhibit in their language only reflects the solid focus on their self-centered goals. The shallowness I’ve often found in Southerners’ polite facade makes ill-intent harder to detect, but it’s there quite often. I know a few people (even in my family) with plenty of manners, but no grace at all.
True. For example, what he said when speaking to police today. He is just a mean man. It’s sad.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/07/28/trump-tells-police-not-to-worry-about-injuring-suspects-during-arrests/?utm_term=.a0530bde8824
I guess he doesn’t believe in innocent until proven guilty.
You mean:
Sad!
There are times when there’s no presumption of innocence. Cops show up to a house where a family has been murdered and a man walks out covered in blood and a knife in his hand. A cop pulls over a hit and run driver where there are injuries. A single parent brings an abused child into an ER. A drug dealer gets caught selling to school kids. How much sympathy do you show these people? I for one don’t care if they get their heads bounced off the door frame of the patrol car.
There are very few cops out there who haven’t had a belligerent person in the back who’s face up against the cage screaming, threatening, or spitting at the cop. Many a cop has performed an emergency stop, slamming on the brakes to “avoid the dog that suddenly ran in front of the car”, which sends the person in the back’s face into the cage.
“I for one don’t care if they get their heads bounced off the door frame of the patrol car.”
Perhaps you read the comparisons between what Trump said and an old Seinfeld routine. Here’s the Seinfeld version:
And here’s the (of course, less coherent and harder to follow) Trump version:
Here’s an interesting thing about that, and I think it’s a key, in a small way, to why Trump’s supporters and the rest of us perceive him so differently.
Those of us who are oriented toward the written word are bound to see Trump differently from the way video-oriented types (such as people who primarily get news from TV) do.
You read the words Trump said, and you can sort of figure out what he was trying to say, but it’s so badly worded that you can’t help but wonder what his first language is, and why he has spent so much time in this country without mastering English.
But he’s much easier to follow on the video:
Of course, the easier he is to follow, the more appalling he is.
So never mind; my theory doesn’t work…
Maybe we need to elect more master thespians like Jon Lovitz.
ACTING!…
POTUS’s rhetoric is far more about order (the authoritarian type) than about law. Revisiting the old debate of safety (security) over freedom (liberty).
But now Press Secretary Sanders says POTUS was just kidding.
Well you can be principled or you can be reactionary. I prefer the former.
If the principle is that you treat people with respect, then you do it even to people who have not done it. You don’t let their behavior be the deciding factor in yours. Not if you have your own mind.
I agree with Matthew Dowd that Trump’s behavior and I think this vignette as well exemplify “a weak person’s idea of what a strong person is.”
Good God, man. I thought I was the only one who couldn’t not sing the Bohemian Rhapsody when saying his name.
Alas and apparently, he will not be doing the fandango undo COS Kelly…
[edit]
*UNDER* COS Kelly.
The whole healthcare debacle illustrates in spades just how soulless the Grand Old Party really is. This is an outfit that not only completely lacks empathy, compassion and common decency but apparently they don’t even have an ounce of competency. It is untenable any longer to suggest the Republican party as a whole is one iota better than Donald Trump. The two compliment each other with their crass, disgusting behavior. The only difference is Trump is a bit more crude about it. But at the end of the day the party of Trump owns this mess.
On the positive side, their complete incompetence means that the ACA and Obama’s economic policies are pretty much in tact, at least for now. Sadly foreign policy, immigration and environmental issues are suffering. How many days until the next election? Then again, with the gerrymandering and voter suppression the GOP might end up gaining seats?
Obama’s economic policies were never enacted thanks to the “Waterloo”-minded obstruction of the Republicans. Other than the stimulus package that worked by the assessment of almost every non-aligned economist, nothing else he tried to do was passed other than a temporary FICA cut to finish out bending the recession upward. The Republicans still refer to the stimulus as “failed” because they tried unsuccessfully to block it. Prior to the ACA, he did get some pay equity and other measures passed, but nothing major on taxes and spending outside the stimulus. The FED had to keep the economy from heading back to the ditch through monetary policy. His minimum wage efforts (less dramatic than those presently put forward got no hearing under the January 2010 changeover. I’d have loved to see an Obama economy from 2010 until now. He just kept a steady hand and fought off nonsense from the right-wingers.
The economy couldn’t be much better than it is now, could it? Unemployment is very low, housing market is very strong, stocks are at all time high. If this is the effect of Congress and Obama doing nothing over the past six years, I’m all for more of the same.
It’s doing remarkably well for most, but rests too much on debt and speculation, both public and private. In a sense, it’s supported by a credit card. Stock prices should be based on earnings, not rumors and herd mentality. Infrastructure elements are woefully neglected and showing wear to the point of danger. The FED has been the biggest pillar of support. Deficits have come down since 2009, but now look to start back up. As usual, time will tell.
So in other words, nothing has changed since the 1980’s.
Exactly. We’ll know we are headed for another recession when there is a spike in second mortgages used to pay for vacations and in zero down, balloon payment mortgages, Then many will blame the banks for the stupidity of people who don’t like to save money to make purchases.
I just hope there’s no bail out for the idiots who didn’t learn the first time. I know V.C. Summer folks/neighbors who were buying new vehicles, boats, expensive vacations, etc… like their jobs were safe until retirement. Time to start watching Craigslist for cheap, nearly new items.
It doesn’t look good from where I’m standing. And as I look around at friends and relatives — who are in a number of different lines of work — they don’t seem to be thriving the way most of us did before 2008.
That’s not a political argument because I don’t think in those terms — I don’t vote based on how it might economically benefit me. And I think it’s silly to blame Bush for the crash, or Obama for not fully pulling us out of it. And if the economy right now is as good as you say it is, I’m certainly not giving The Creature credit for it. Nor do I blame him for things being as sluggish as I think they are…
I’m just telling you that I look around and, though this is summertime, the livin’ ain’t as easy as it was a decade ago… I just don’t see as many people working at jobs that provide a comfortable middle-class living..
It’s all in perspective. My neighborhood has seen 20 new homes built in the 250-350K range in the past year with another 20 coming in the next year. Many, many service businesses are begging for employees now. We went out to the Sandhills mall area on Friday and it was packed. That’s disposable income being spent.
The biggest problem with the economy now is the massive student debt that foolish young people accumulated without ever thinking about how to pay it back.
I don’t give Trump or Obama any credit. It’s a cyclical market. There will be ups and downs always.
The key is finding a profession that cannot be outsourced, commoditized, or digitized.
I drove past The State building on Shop Road on Saturday night and was amazed at the sheer size of that operation to essentially produce something that should be available digitally. There’s no way that exists 10 years from now (maybe 5)… and that’s not a function of a bad economy, just a bad business model.
Yes, Doug; you’ve made the point a million times: I’m an idiot for devoting myself to the profession where I could make a contribution to my community using the skills God gave me.
And I know that you will never, ever understand that for me, journalism is a calling. And I expect even less that you would understand that I never, at any time in my life, ever stopped and thought, “How could I make the most money?” I’m just not made that way. I had to find something that engaged me, something that gave me a reason to get up in the morning and work hard late into the night.
Perhaps I should have been like Bruce Jenner. I remember during the Olympics when he distinguished himself back in the 70s, in one of those interminable interviews TV sports people do between the action, he said — without embarrassment — that he chose commercial real estate because he could make a bunch of money without working hard. He meant that it allowed him time to train, but what I came away with was the thought, “What an amazingly shallow person!”
In retrospect, perhaps I should have been that way. I’d give anything to have back those evenings that I was stuck at work and missed thousands of crucial hours of my children growing up. The loss I feel because of that is bitter indeed.
But it’s the only course I saw open to me at the time.
I believe we all have an obligation to serve. My Dad’s way was the Navy. That wasn’t open to me, on account of the stupid asthma. So I did what I could, and this is the way I went…
And of course, since leaving the paper, I’ve done everything I could to stay here and be with my grandchildren, rather than pursuing journalism jobs where they are plentiful — in Washington, for instance.
Maybe I’m trying to make up for time lost with my kids…
I haven’t ever claimed you were an idiot for your career choice. All I have ever suggested is that you may not have seen the handwriting on the wall when the signs of the shift in the industry were happening.
You’ve made your choices since leaving The State. There’s nothing wrong with those choices. But there is a hint of some unrealistic expectations on your part when it comes to thinking your career would never change or be impacted by the digital age. I’ve faced technology change in my job on at least four occasions and have had to retrain myself each time as well as accept traveling out of state. I probably have one more major shift coming before I retire and I try to stay aware of what’s happening so the choice will be mine and not forced on me.
Doug!
“you may not have seen the handwriting on the wall when the signs of the shift in the industry were happening…”
I’m pretty sure I saw it decades before you did. It started with the move by advertisers to direct mail in the 80s… but y’all don’t want me to tell that whole story again.
As for this…
“But there is a hint of some unrealistic expectations on your part when it comes to thinking your career would never change or be impacted by the digital age…”
What the hey??!?!??! Allow me to introduce myself. I’m the guy who, in 1980 when we were moving from typewriters to a mainframe, said, “If I can hit SEND on this reporter’s story and send it to the copy desk, why can’t it go straight to the reader instead of having to spend hours in a 19th-century manufacturing and delivery process?” (The answer is that “personal computers” were not yet a thing. Nor was the Web. As my first mentor Reid Ashe demonstrated four years later when he ran the ahead-of-its-time Viewtron service. Before shutting it down, they were giving away TRS-80s to try to persuade people to subscribe to the dial-up service.)
At every step — including that initial move into writing on computers instead of paper — I was ALWAYS either on the main committee planning the whole move or I was one of the superusers who trained everyone else how to use the new technology, or both.
I’m the guy who led the way into pagination in the 90s (editorial paginated ahead of news partly because we were smaller, but also because Brad was there and determined to make it happen), and most enthusiastically embraced the Web. I was THE only active blogger — and an extremely active one — at The State when I got laid off.
My only fault was that I had not yet adopted Twitter when still at the paper (nor had anyone else — it was still brand-new), but since then I’ll gladly stack my social media chops against any journalist you care to name…
Has all of this — more than 30 years of leaping out ahead of the leading edge — gone unnoticed by everyone? Apparently it has by Doug…
If I’d been in the bakery business, I would have been the guy who said, “Why don’t we SLICE the bread before we sell it…?”
Weren’t you using some ancient version of a typesetting program to layout the editorial pages?
The point is The State has consistently missed the boat on embracing the digital age. The website has been a joke with every revision. The use of social media is minimal as far as I can tell. Reporters don’t do video, don’t do podcasts. Ron Aiken creates more in a week that is newsworthy than the entire staff of The State.
As far as I can tell, there is rarely any commentary on Cindi Ross-Scoppe’s columns. How can that be? Are they even being read online? I’d love to see the number of page views. There certainly isn’t anything that would approach the back and forth that occurs on your blog.
So if you mean The State, say The State. Don’t say “Brad”…
Not that I’m inviting you to pick on my friends — but I am gonna stick up for myself, especially as much of an early adopter as I have been my whole life.
As for this: “Weren’t you using some ancient version of a typesetting program to layout the editorial pages?”
I think you’re remembering me mentioning using a decade-old version of Word. Which was fine at that time. For newspaper work, the initial writing and editing could be in Notepad, as long as you put it in the proper format, add the HTML, etc., after that.
Frequently to this day, I pass copy through Notepad to wash out the formatting before doing what I want to do with it… It’s just a quick copy-paste, copy-paste, takes about a second..
You’re conflating individual software programs that you may have used with the much larger sea change that occurred technology-wise with the internet. There were a hundred red flags that started waving in about 1996 about what was going to happen with the hardcopy newspaper business. And then you saw the staff cuts, then the dropping circulation, then cutting back the opinion page to one page, and what changed? Just less of the same content delivered less frequently. How did you embrace technology to respond to help The State make the transition into the digital age? Your blog seemed to be a starting point back then…
As someone who describes himself as a “forest vs. trees” kind of guy, you were busy chopping on the same little tree while the forest fire was blazing around you.
The forest is bigger than you’re thinking.
The thing that killed newspapers as they were had NOTHING to do with the technology of how the news is gathered and presented. Nothing at all. In fact, every technology change that came along was helpful.
The PROBLEM was that back in the 80s, starting with direct mail, marketers turned away from trying to buy entire local markets (which is what buying a newspaper ad was, which is why we were always bragging about our “penetration”), and started trying to reach out to customers as individuals.
The Web’s big role was to make it a billion times easier to do just that. With the Web, you not only know what people buy; you know what they’re thinking about buying.
You have to understand that as a BUSINESS, newspapers weren’t about selling news and commentary. The BUSINESS was about the ads.
And suddenly, once marketers didn’t care about MARKETS the way they cared about individual customers, the drive to buy mass media in metropolitan markets evaporated.
So the world no longer wanted to buy what newspapers were selling — which was access to geographic and demographic markets, NOT news.
We journalists were a public service that was paid for by that business that dried up and went away.
Oh, and before you say “web ads” — you can’t charge enough for web ads to support expensive newsrooms. Why is that? Because you’ve lost your monopoly, and you’re in competition against ad providers who don’t have expensive newsrooms to support.
That’s why, to shift gears slightly, it’s so cool that Jeff Bezos — who has become the wealthiest man in the world by being the best at this new way of selling things — bought The Washington Post and started pumping money back into the newsroom.
Journalists are not businessmen and never will be. We’ve always been dependent on business people to support what we do. Now, finally, there’s at least ONE paper supported by a businessman who knows how to make money the new way — something that the business side of newspapers has struggled to learn for more than three decades now…
So you were given a 20+ year warning and stuck with it? I’d think after half the market tanked that one would start to get concerned rather than thinking it’ll turn around any day now.
I never thought that.
You guys just don’t get it. The work was the point. Journalism was the point. It wasn’t making money, or whatever reason people take jobs that they don’t care about. It was about being useful to the community doing what I’m best at.
So I had to do it as long as it was possible to do it.
The only wrong calculation I made was that I feared I would be the last person left in editorial. But that ended up being Cindi.
I thought that because, especially after Mike Fitts left, I was the only person in the department who knew how to do everything involved in producing the editorial pages — or producing a whole newspaper, for that matter. I was a master of all the skills, from newsgathering through writing and editing and page design and shooting and editing photos and video through the entire production process, all the way to the presses — and all aspects on the online operation, short of writing code. (As I recall, one of the last things I did at the paper was give Cindi and Warren a lesson in using Photoshop to improve contrast in the little mug shots with columns so they would show up well in the paper.)
I could see ending up alone doing it all, and it was a very depressing thought.
But the decision, in the end, was made on the fact that I made the most money, not in terms of what skills were needed to produce a newspaper or an online product. I didn’t foresee THAT, because as you know, I don’t think in those terms…
But of course, if I HAD foreseen being laid off, I still would have stayed on the job as long as possible.
That’s because I believed then, and believe now, that I possess skills that add value for readers. And serving them is the point…
Picture a top notch Blockbuster store manager in 2002.. sailing along, made the transition from VHS to DVD smoothly since the business model was about delivering content into the hands of customers who walked into the store. Now he hears about this service called Netflix that will ship the DVD’s to the customer through the mail and let them keep 1-2 of them as long as they want. How long should this guy have waited before he decided to get ahead of the pending sea change in his industry? Surely the signs were there after a couple years. Then Amazon and Hulu start skipping the need to physically ship the DVD’s any more. Another red flag? Or does he just keep grinding, trying to spruce up the DVD racks, offering 2-1 Tuesdays? Soon he finds he has to layoff half his staff. Then he takes a business loan to keep the doors open. Finally, the store closes and he shakes his fist at Netflix and Amazon for “stealing” his business.
That’s the newspaper business… and the pager business… and K-Mart… and Sears… and it’s starting to happen at cable companies and entities like ESPN (cord cutters). None of these transitions happened overnight. Some people just either refuse to see the signs or else fight the inevitable until its over.
You either act or you react.
Netflix is the perfect example of how the newspaper industry SHOULD have responded to the technology change. They shifted from DVDs to digital content (it wasn’t easy but they did it)… and then they saw that the most important word in the phrase “digital content” was “content” and have invested BILLIONS in creating their own content.
Newspapers on the other hand started cutting people including the ones who were best at creating content, , trimming the size of the paper, raising the price but basically just doing the same thing. People will pay for content and will pay for immediacy – something a hardcopy paper cannot “deliver”.
Content is king. Content drives revenues. It looks like it took an outsider like Jeff Bezos to make a real effort to change the business model.
And I honor him for it.
As I wrote in that Brookings piece a couple of years back — we need more people like Bezos and Buffett stepping in and doing stuff like this…
I tend to use microeconomic observations to judge how the economy is doing: are restaurants busy (yes), are the hotels I stay at every week full (yes — Marriott stock has doubled in the past year).. are people spending a lot of money on high end dog food (yes – my dogs eat better than me some days).
Which just goes to show how good your dog is at manipulating you… 🙂
My wife.. not the dogs. The dogs would at Alpo and love it.
Yeah, we Mad Men have not yet figured out how to scam dogs into buying stuff.
Even though we have actual dogs working here at ADCO, and have for years…
In the foreground you see Moose, participating in an important work session at ADCO: