Category Archives: Media

Blaming media, Nobel for rise of modern terrorism

Probably for the same reason I got a second major in history in college, I enjoy when someone takes a step back from events to provide a bit of historical perspective, as Max Boot did this morning in the WSJ on the history of modern terrorism.

And just as Eli Whitney revived the cotton industry and therefore slavery in this country, Boot (I love that guy’s name; sounds like a character Arnold Schwarzenegger would play in a movie) says three things helped launch a wave of terrorist groups around the world about a century ago: the inventions of dynamite, the telegraph and the high-speed newspaper press:

Nobel

It is no coincidence that the era of modern terrorism began at almost the same time that Alfred Nobel invented dynamite: 1867. There had been a few isolated terrorist gangs before then—which is to say, groups that murdered civilians in order to further a political or religious agenda. The Sicarri, the Jewish dagger-men who killed Roman collaborators in first-century Judaea, come to mind. So do the Assassins, the Shiite sect that terrorized Middle Eastern leaders in the Middle Ages. But such examples are few and far between, whereas the late 19th century saw the flowering of the first age of international terrorism, featuring such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan, the Irish Fenians, the Russian Nihilists and the anarchists who operated in both Europe and the Americas.

Their growth was greatly aided by the invention of portable weapons such as breech-loading revolvers and especially dynamite, which was 20 times more powerful than the gunpowder that Guy Fawkes and his fellow Catholic conspirators had used in an attempt to blow up the British Parliament in 1605.

Just as important was the invention of the telegraph and the high-speed printing press, which made possible the rise of cheap newspapers and magazines—the world’s first mass media. Terrorism is above all an act of communication, insofar as terrorist groups are too small and too weak to fight conventional armies in the open field. Unlike guerrilla groups, most purely terrorist organizations don’t even attempt attacks on security forces; they prefer to strike “soft” targets such as the Boston Marathon, where they know that their actions, the more heinous the better, will attract widespread publicity. (Note, however, that many insurgencies use both guerrilla and terrorist tactics, striking both security forces and civilians, as the Irish Republican Army and the Viet Cong did.)…

There’s one flaw in this explanation, as it applies to the most recent incident: The pressure-cooker bombs used in Boston may have used black powder, rather than dynamite or plastique.

Still, I like a good theory.

Speculation in the era of 24/7 news

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I got an email from blog regular Barry this morning:

another very disappointing thing to see (Boston)

Watching TV media folks (Savannah Guthrie on The Today Show a few mins ago for one) asking terrorism experts to speculate “what does your gut tell you?” in questions regarding who is responsible for the attack. (BTW – Savannah is also an attorney)

The expert this morning told Savannah ” I don’t speculate and I don’t go off my gut. I am trained to look for evidence and go where the evidence takes me.” – a great answer to a really sorry question.

How pitiful – asking someone to speculate on such a tragedy – and I suspect she asked it so that will have something to jump on him if his speculation or “gut” feeling isn’t correct. Sick of seeing that type of questioning from media folks.

My answer was to say that I don’t have the highest opinion of 24/7 cable TV “news” to begin with. But I think it’s off-base to speculate that “so that will have something to jump on him if his speculation or ‘gut’ feeling isn’t correct.”

Questions like that arise from the very nature of 24/7 TV “news.” They have to keep talking, throughout the long hours when nothing is known. So inevitably, just to have something new to talk about, they get into speculation. And yeah, eventually the talk itself becomes the topic, and a misstatement by an official could become the latest thing to talk about.

It’s not good. But it’s not nefarious.

What it is is an argument for the old way of doing news — once a day, which gave you a chance to pull things together and think about what you were presenting to the world, whatever your medium.

But we’ll never get that toothpaste back into the tube.

And just so you don’t think I’m just picking on broadcast, note the above headline from the New York Post from yesterday afternoon. I mentioned it on my blog yesterday, even having that number in a headline briefly (but cautiously attributing it to a “report”).

The thoughtful hedonist: Russell Brand on Thatcher

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You probably don’t want to watch it with your mom, or with your children for that matter, but I have seen few things funnier in recent years than Russell Brand in “Get Him to the Greek.” From his first line, “I’m Aldous Snow, the rock star,” his embodiment of an out-of-control hedonist is so devastatingly spot on, you come away convinced that that is who he really is (of course, his personal biography isn’t that far distant from Snow’s).

But messed up as he may be, he’s a bright guy who can actually be fairly thoughtful (interestingly, there were flashes of that in the Aldous Snow character, tucked among the Jeffrey-induced outrages). He showed that in a piece he wrote for The Guardian a couple of days back. Excerpts:

One Sunday recently while staying in London, I took a stroll in the gardens of Temple, the insular clod of quads and offices between the Strand and the Embankment. It’s kind of a luxury rent-controlled ghetto for lawyers and barristers, and there is a beautiful tailors, a fine chapel, established by the Knights Templar (from which the compound takes its name), a twee cottage designed by Sir Christopher Wren and a rose garden; which I never promised you.

My mate John and I were wandering there together, he expertly proselytising on the architecture and the history of the place, me pretending to be Rumpole of the Bailey (quietly in my mind), when we spied in the distant garden a hunched and frail figure, in a raincoat, scarf about her head, watering the roses under the breezy supervision of a masticating copper. “What’s going on there, mate?” John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. “Maggie Thatcher,” he said. “Comes here every week to water them flowers.” The three of us watched as the gentle horticultural ritual was feebly enacted, then regarded the Iron Lady being helped into the back of a car and trundling off. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. None present eyed her meanly or spoke with vitriol and it wasn’t until an hour later that I dreamt up an Ealing comedy-style caper in which two inept crooks kidnap Thatcher from the garden but are unable to cope with the demands of dealing with her, and finally give her back. This reverie only occurred when the car was out of view. In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon…

The blunt, pathetic reality today is that a little old lady has died, who in the winter of her life had to water roses alone under police supervision. If you behave like there’s no such thing as society, in the end there isn’t. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. It isn’t sad for anyone else. There are pangs of nostalgia, yes, because for me she’s all tied up with Hi-De-Hi and Speak and Spell and Blockbusters and “follow the bear”. What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people’s pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought to annihilate…

Rough stuff. But then there are bits like this:

When I awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital eulogies. It’d be disingenuous to omit that there were a fair number of ding-dong-style celebratory messages amidst the pensive reflections on the end of an era. Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. “I thought I’d be overjoyed, but really it’s just … another one bites the dust …” This demonstrates, I suppose, that if you opposed Thatcher’s ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one’s enemies…

I found it interesting because it gave me insight into the attitudes of a young Brit growing up in the Thatcher era — someone whose life wasn’t politics. I think he probably speaks for a lot of people in his generation, those who aren’t inclined to engage in the execrable “Ding-Dong” celebrations, but aren’t at all interested in fitting her with a halo, either.

I was also intrigued by the bits of communitarianism that crept into the writing of this young man best known in this country for playing a narcissist, such as “If you behave like there’s no such thing as society, in the end there isn’t.”

I share it as something from an unexpected quarter that broadened my understanding a bit.

The amazing thing about newspapers, as interpreted by ‘George Costanza’

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Romenesko shared this, which he got from The Harvard Crimson. It’s from an interview with Jason Alexander, best known for his role as George Costanza on “Seinfeld”:

The first time I really thought, “Oh my god, Jerry Seinfeld is brilliant” was when he did a joke about newspapers, and how relieved the editors of a newspaper must be when exactly the right amount of things happen everyday to make the paper come out perfectly, so that at six o’clock at their deadline, you don’t go, “Oh, one more thing happened,” and now you have a blank page with two paragraphs.

I’ve always loved that joke, too. Because while it is meant to be seen as ridiculous, it taps into a sense of wonder I had about newspaper from an early age.

When I was in second or third grade, I read a book of short stories aimed at people my age. It had a theme — each story opened a window on some different aspect of the big wide world, meant to show kids the possibilities for when they grew up. One story, the one I remember best, was about a kid who went to work for a newspaper as a copy boy (which would be my first newspaper job, at the Memphis Commercial Appeal, years later). The reader followed the boy as he learned about everything it took to publish a newspaper each day.

I was struck with awe at the enormity of such a task. I couldn’t believe any group of people, no matter how experienced or talented, could get all of those things done in a day, every day. And yet there was the proof, on my doorstep each morning.

Decades later, after I had mastered every aspect of the process, I used to wonder sometimes at the complaints we’d get from readers. Someone would be griping at me about some small thing that, in his or her opinion, wasn’t quite right in the paper, and I would remember that story and how it impressed me. And I’d think, Hasn’t this person ever thought about what a miracle it is that the paper comes out at all? Obviously not, or they’d have backed off a bit.

I’ve never thought a single actual error in any paper I worked for was excusable. And readers deserved to demand the same high standard from us. But occasionally, when they were going on and on about some tiny thing that had gone wrong (or that they saw as having gone wrong), I’d find myself wishing they’d pause, just a moment, to be impressed by everything that was right, against all odds…

Oh, wait, one other thing… Having spent a lot of years making the news fit the paper, ruthlessly wielding a light-blue felt pen (which humans could read, but the camera that shot the page when it was done could not pick up) in composing rooms, or trimming with marginally greater delicacy on a computer screen, I found myself puzzled that Yahoo paid a high-school kid tens of millions for an app that… well, here’s the description:

Yahoo was attracted to Summly’s core technology for automatically summarizing news articles. The technology, which included an algorithm for deriving the summaries, was created with help from SRI International, a Silicon Valley research-and development firm that has an artificial-intelligence lab and has an ownership stake in the startup….

In 2011, Mr. D’Aloisio founded his company, at the time called Trimit. He redesigned the app to automatically boil news articles down to 400-word summaries and re-launched it as Summly in late 2012 with help from SRI…

I thought, hey, I could have done that for Yahoo for half the money. And I wouldn’t have needed an app for it. It only takes seconds per story. I’ll admit, the slashing I used to do in composing rooms (and on computer screens) wasn’t always a work of art when I was in a hurry (which was most of the time) — but I kind of doubt this app is any more respectful of the writers’ precious words…

The passing of Roger Ebert, a great movie critic

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33ebert

This from his paper, the Chicago Sun-Times, a few minutes ago:

For a film with a daring director, a talented cast, a captivating plot or, ideally, all three, there could be no better advocate than Roger Ebert, who passionately celebrated and promoted excellence in film while deflating the awful, the derivative, or the merely mediocre with an observant eye, a sharp wit and a depth of knowledge that delighted his millions of readers and viewers.

“No good film is too long,” he once wrote, a sentiment he felt strongly enough about to have engraved on pens. “No bad movie is short enough.”

Ebert, 70, who reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and on TV for 31 years, and who was without question the nation’s most prominent and influential film critic, died Thursday in Chicago. He had been in poor health over the past decade, battling cancers of the thyroid and salivary gland.

He
lost part of his lower jaw in 2006, and with it the ability to speak or eat, a calamity that would have driven other men from the public eye. But Ebert refused to hide, instead forging what became a new chapter in his career, an extraordinary chronicle of his devastating illness that won him a new generation of admirers. “No point in denying it,” he wrote, analyzing his medical struggles with characteristic courage, candor and wit, a view that was never tinged with bitterness or self-pity…

Ebert had announced a few days ago on his blog that cancer had struck again, and that he would be taking a “leave of presence,” dialing back his own involvement and running mostly reviews from others on his website. “I am not going away,” he said.

If only he could have kept his promise.

I had come to appreciate Ebert more than ever in recent years, as I embraced social media. He was an avid practitioner, Tweeting all hours of the day and night on all topics, using the new medium to make up for his inability to speak. I thought it great that he could do that, and not be cut off from the world.

But now he has been cut off from it. That’s sad news, and I thought I’d share it.

AP says there are no more ‘illegal immigrants’ in the U.S.

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But Doug and others who’ve been yearning for this day shouldn’t get overexcited. AP says we still have an “illegal immigration” problem.

It’s a matter of style.

Most news organizations in this country follow The Associated Press Stylebook quite religiously. Except for a few local exceptions here and there, so did every paper I ever worked at.

And AP style just changed. Those who follow the guide are no longer to call anyone an “illegal immigrant,” or refer to people as “illegals.”

Romenesko quotes from the statement today from AP explaining the change:

The Stylebook no longer sanctions the term “illegal immigrant” or the use of “illegal” to describe a person. Instead, it tells users that “illegal” should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally…

The discussions on this topic have been wide-ranging and include many people from many walks of life. (Earlier, they led us to reject descriptions such as “undocumented,” despite ardent support from some quarters, because it is not precise. A person may have plenty of documents, just not the ones required for legal residence.)…

… we had in other areas been ridding the Stylebook of labels. The new section on mental health issues argues for using credibly sourced diagnoses instead of labels. Saying someone was “diagnosed with schizophrenia” instead of schizophrenic, for example.

And that discussion about labeling people, instead of behavior, led us back to “illegal immigrant” again.

We concluded that to be consistent, we needed to change our guidance.

So we have….

Here’s the way the entry in the Stylebook reads now:

illegal immigration Entering or residing in a country in violation of civil or criminal law. Except in direct quotes essential to the story, use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant. Acceptable variations include living in or entering a country illegally or without legal permission.

Except in direct quotations, do not use the terms illegal alien, an illegal, illegals or undocumented.

Do not describe people as violating immigration laws without attribution.

Specify wherever possible how someone entered the country illegally and from where. Crossed the border? Overstayed a visa? What nationality?

People who were brought into the country as children should not be described as having immigrated illegally. For people granted a temporary right to remain in the U.S. under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, use temporary resident status, with details on the program lower in the story.

There’s a certain logic to this, but I think the AP is going about a step too far. I can see not describing humans as “illegals.” It’s lazy, and unless a person has been declared an outlaw in the full meaning of the term (is that even possible in today’s legal system), the person himself is not illegal.

But by doing away with “illegal immigrant,” AP is eliminating a perfectly clear and accurate way of describing one aspect of a person. I doubt the service would balk at “recent immigrant,” or any other accurate modifier used with the word “immigrant.” “Illegal immigrant” is a quick, accurate way to describe a characteristic of an individual that is important to the story (else it wouldn’t be mentioned at all). I see no reason to inconvenience thousands of writers and millions of readers by forcing them into less direct ways of communicating the same concept.

At the end of the day, Mark Sanford needs to read this list

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Enjoyed this piece about cliches from an editor at The Washington Post:

Pity the poor editor seeking to avoid cliches. It is a futile attempt that, for better or worse, only shines a spotlight on what has become the new normal.

Be that as it may, it is fun. Over the past couple of years, I have joined with colleagues throughout The Washington Post, especially the inimitable Anne Kornblut, to collect cliched words and phrases that journalists rely on too much — indeed, at their peril. It was a little-noticed collection that has suddenly become oft-cited, perhaps even going viral.

After Jim Romenesko posted the list on his blog, I expected pushback from the powers that be, who might want to double down on their use of such terms. Instead, we received support from a dizzying array of sources, in particular through a feeding frenzy ofretweets and e-mails. Clearly, this hot-button issue struck a nerve…

You catch his drift, I’m sure. But go read the whole thing.

This list should come in handy to Mark Sanford. I would say, all he’d have to do is run all the proscribed phrases together and presto! He’s got another speech…

The problem with writing your column ahead of time

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Meant to mention this over the weekend…

Peggy Noonan tends to work ahead of time on her weekly column for the WSJ, which runs in the print version on Saturday. I can’t swear to this, but I think I’ve seen it posted early on Friday in the past.

That makes her more of a Cindi Scoppe than a Brad Warthen. Cindi always wrote a piece as soon as the idea had fully coalesced and she had all the legwork for it, even if it wasn’t to run for days. I never started writing a column until the day it was due. I take that back; “never’ isn’t quite right. Sometimes I would stay late on Thursday night trying to write my Sunday column (which was due midday Friday). But when I did, I usually scrapped it for a fresher idea, or completely rewrote it, on Friday. Which made the work ahead of time seem sort of pointless.

There was also the thing that I just wrote better under deadline pressure, which is why what I did on Friday was better than anything I’d written on Thursday, usually.

But the biggest reason why I didn’t write ahead of time was beautifully illustrated by Ms. Noonan’s column this past weekend. An excerpt:

It’s not a debt and deficit crisis, it’s a jobs crisis. The debt and the deficit are part of it, part of the general fear that we’re on a long slide and can’t turn it around. The federal tax code is part of it—it’s a drag on everything, a killer of the spirit of guts and endeavor. Federal regulations are part of it. The administration’s inability to see the stunning and historic gift of the energy revolution is part of it.

But it’s a jobs crisis that’s the central thing. And you see it everywhere you look…

That’s how it started. This is how it ended:

… Mr. Obama is making the same mistake he made four years ago. We are in a jobs crisis and he does not see it. He thinks he’s in a wrestling match about taxing and spending, he thinks he’s in a game with those dread Republicans. But the real question is whether the American people will be able to have jobs.

Once they do, so much will follow—deficits go down a little as fewer need help, revenues go up as more pay taxes. Confidence and trust in the future will grow. People will be happier.

There’s little sense he sees this. Dr. Doom talks about coming disaster when businessmen need the confidence to hire someone. He’s missing the boat on the central crisis of his second term.

Unlike many of her columns, which range across several topics, the whole thrust of this one was what a failure Obama is on jobs.

And yes, that column ran the day after we learned the economy had added a surprisingly high 236,000 jobs in February, bringing the unemployment rate to its lowest point in four years.

Now of course, one can quibble about how good that news is. And indeed, her column was updated with the new unemployment figure, and she wrote, “The jobless rate, officially 7.7%, is almost twice that if you include those who have stopped looking, work part time, or are only ‘marginally attached’ to the workforce.”

But still. If she’d waited until Friday to write the thing, she’d have chosen a different topic. This was the worst Saturday in four years for making the argument she advanced in this one.

‘Jumping the shark:’ You keep using that phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means…

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In today’s WSJ, under the headline, “Jumping the sequester,” columnist Kimberley A. Strassel writes the following:

The phrase “jumping the shark” describes that gimmicky moment when something once considered significant is exposed as ludicrous. This is the week the White House jumped the sequester.

The precise moment came Tuesday, when the administration announced that it was canceling public tours of the White House, blaming budget cuts. The Sequesterer in Chief has insisted that cutting even $44 billion from this fiscal year will cause agonizing pain—airport security snarls, uninspected meat, uneducated children. Since none of those things has come to pass, the White House decided it needed an immediate and high-profile way of making its point. Ergo, it would deny the nation’s school kids a chance to view a symbol of America.

The act was designed to spark outrage against Republicans, yet the sheer pettiness of it instead provided a moment of clarity. Americans might not understand the technicalities of sequester, but this was something else entirely. Was the president actually claiming there was not a single other government item—not one—that could be cut instead of the White House tours? Really?

Yeahhh… I don’t think that’s jumping the shark. Do y’all.? That sounds to me like somebody wrote the headline first, and tried to force the column to fit it. Let’s look at the Wikipedia definition:

Jumping the shark is an idiom created by Jon Hein that is used to describe the moment in the evolution of a television show when it begins a decline in quality that is beyond recovery, which is usually a particular scene, episode, or aspect of a show in which the writers use some type of “gimmick” in a desperate attempt to keep viewers’ interest…

And here’s the origin:

The phrase jump the shark comes from a scene in the fifth season premiere episode of the American TV series Happy Days titled “Hollywood: Part 3“, written by Fred Fox, Jr.^[4] which aired on September 20, 1977. In the episode, the central characters visit Los Angeles, where a water-skiing Fonzie (Henry Winkler) answers a challenge to his bravery by wearing swim trunks and his trademark leather jacket, and jumping over a confined shark. The stunt was created as a way to showcase Winkler’s real life water ski skills.^[5]

For a show that in its early seasons depicted universally relatable adolescent and family experiences against a backdrop of 1950s nostalgia, this incident marked an audacious, cartoonish turn towards attention-seeking gimmickry. Initially a supporting character, the faddish lionization of an increasingly superhuman Fonzie became the focus of Happy Days. The series continued for seven years after Fonzie’s shark-jumping stunt, with a number of changes in cast and situations. However, it is commonly^[who?] believed that the show began a creative decline in this era, as writers ran out of ideas, and Happy Daysbecame a caricature of itself. As a nod to the episode, Henry Winkler’s character again jumped a shark in the 2003 show Arrested Development…

To me, that’s a pretty clear definition that the Strossel example doesn’t fit. You can call the White House cancellation of tours all kinds of things — in these parts, we’d call it a “Big Bird defense” — but it’s not jumping the shark.

That said, the very same Wikipedia entry I quote above gives an example, also involving Barack Obama, that I don’t think fits either:

In 2008 during the Obama presidential campaign, at a meeting of Democratic governors in Chicago, each governor was identified with a name plate while Senator Obama had a large seal – that looked official but was not.^[11] The New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Rich wrote “For me, Mr. Obama showed signs of jumping the shark two weeks back, when he appeared at a podium affixed with his own pompous faux-presidential seal”.^[12]

So what do I consider to be a perfect example of jumping the shark? This: When the Beverly Hillbillies went to England. Actually, that series jumped the shark several times; it was sort of a defining characteristic. It sort of did so when Jethro received his draft notice and costumed himself as Patton and bought a tank. It really, really did so when the whole cast jumped fictional universes, going to Hooterville to interact with characters from “Petticoat Junction” and “Green Acres.” (A radical change of venue can be a good sign that a shark is being jumped.)

In fact, those examples are so good that I have trouble coming up with any others that illustrate the concept so well, as I understand it. It’s not limited to iconic sitcoms, of course. And it can be translated to politics. When Bill Clinton played saxophone on Arsenio Hall seems a pretty clear example. If you go way back, there’s Richard Nixon’s “Sock it to me?” on “Laugh-In.”

But closing the White House to tours? Not so much…

The truth about SC: Taxes are low and getting lower, and government is not ‘growing’

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Cindi Scoppe struck another blow today in the lonely fight to base public policy in South Carolina on facts. It’s not only a lonely, but a losing battle, since the people who are driving things in the State House have contempt for facts, preferring to “govern” on the basis of extremist ideology, which holds that facts are bunk.

Basically, she was answering this kind of nonsense:

Consider this analysis from an Upstate anti-government activist, speaking recently to The Greenville News: “Every year our state budget continues to go up, up, up, far exceeding our growth. So we’re getting more government, we’re getting higher taxes.

“They tell us, ‘We cut taxes.’ That’s nonsense. How can you increase spending and cut taxes and yet you claim that we also are not running a deficit? The numbers don’t add up.”

That certainly sounds like a sensible analysis. And there are circumstances under which it could be accurate. If, say, our population were remaining stagnant, or declining. Or if people’s income or purchases remained flat, or declined. But of course none of that is happening.

What’s happening isn’t that complicated. It just isn’t necessarily intuitive…

And what is happening is that tax rates have been lowered over and over for the past two decades. What is also happening is that, while the total amount of state funds spent on government is greater because of our skyrocketing population growth, the amount spent per capita is less and less:

South Carolina’s tax collections are the lowest in the nation, at $1,476.50 per capita; they dropped 18 percent from 2001 to 2011 — more than they did in 48 states. Our combined state and local tax burden per capita was less than all but one state, at $2,742. Our 2012 Tax Freedom Day — the date when we’ve earned enough money to pay all of our federal, state and local taxes for the year — was earlier than all but three states, at April 3.

This is simply not a state in which we’re “getting higher taxes.”

Ah, but our government is growing, right? Well, if by “growing government,” you mean that the total amount spent on state government each year is generally more than it was the previous year, then yes, it’s growing. With the exception of two years during the recession, state general fund expenditures (the money over which the Legislature has the most control) are growing — although this year’s $6.1 billion general fund budget is still down from the $6.7 billion in 2008-09, just before the recession hit.

But remember: While the general fund grew by 12 percent over the past decade, our state’s population grew by 15 percent. That means the Legislature appropriated less general fund money per resident, even without considering inflation, in 2012 than in 2002…

Ah, but what about all those “other funds,” from the feds and fees? Hasn’t that increased the size of government? Consider:

What’s a little surprising is that even with all that federal and other money, the total number of state employees is actually down, from 63,000 in 2002 to 56,000 in 2012. In fact, the total number of state employees has decreased over just about any period you look at during the past two decades, except last year, when it rose slightly from 2011, but remained well below the 2010 level.

So if by “growing government” you mean government is increasing the number of people on the payroll, it’s not.

If you mean government is providing more services, it’s also not. Our state is providing services to more people — Medicaid and food stamps, both funded primarily by the federal government, are prime examples — but it’s not increasing the services to each person…

Actually, you should just go read the whole thing.

Hoffman: Another TV ad from the 1st District

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Looked at from this distance, the contest for the 1st Congressional District GOP nomination has looked like a case of Sanford sitting atop the name-recognition hill, and Larry Grooms exerting the most energy trying to take it from him.

A third candidate I keep hearing from (and let me remind you that my perspective is skewed by the fact that I keep hearing from this guy and Grooms; others could be running just as hard but not making the effort to let me know about it) is Jonathan Hoffman.

No, I hadn’t heard of him, either, so of course he’s running a standard “I’m not a politician” campaign. To the extent that is appealing, he certainly has an advantage over Sanford and Grooms.

But this new TV ad tells me next to nothing. It shows him in uniform, and I thank him for his service. It shows him with the last Republican president. He uses the word “conservative” only once in 30 seconds, which by Republican primary standards shows extraordinary restraint. Of course, he uses other phrases that suggest such values to the base, such as “small business owner.”

And he makes the usual dubious claims that Republicans in SC tend to believe as gospel, such as:

He wants to be elected “to take on out-of-control spending and the growth of government.” Compared to what absolute measure, I find myself wondering. It’s interesting to contrast this belief to what I read this morning in the libertarian Economist, which, after asserting that “By most measures Mr Obama’s positions have been rather moderate,” notes that the public now is in a more conservative mood: “The conservative idea that spending must be cut is taken for granted, even though government spending is already lower in America than in most advanced economies.” Did you catch that? Looked at from outside, the U.S. government is not some out-of-control behemoth. It is only that to people who choose to believe it is.
Then there’s this chestnut: “let’s get back to constitutionally limited government.” Something that, of course, we’ve never left. He doesn’t have to explain what he means because no on in the GOP base would challenge him on it. Me, I want details. Back during the Bush administration, Democrats would say this very same silly thing. They were usually referring to the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 measures that Democrats as well as Republicans voted for and legally passed, under lawmaking provisions of our, ahem, Constitution. Now, Republicans generally mean something like Obamacare. Which, according to the GOP-appointed Chief Justice and a majority on the Supreme Court, is constitutional. Or is he referring to killing U.S. citizens with drones and without the benefit of due process? If so, I’d like to hear him square that with is standing shoulder-to-shoulder with President Bush in fighting the Global War on Terror, which the current president is only guilty of pursuing a tad more aggressively than his predecessor, casting drones far and wide and putting boots on the ground in the very heart of Pakistan.

Mind you, I’m not being critical of Mr. Hoffman. He’s not doing a thing that pols of both parties don’t do in this ridiculously facile medium, the 30-second ad. It would be practically impossible for him to answer the questions he raises in my mind within that format.

But these ads aren’t meant to answer questions. They are meant to communicate, in the most minimalist, Gestalten flicker, a set of emotions along the lines of “he’s like me,” or “I trust that man.” So they deal not in facts, but in presumptions, ones that are shared, even if they fly in the face of reality.

Grooms’ ads are the same. Sanford’s go a bit farther, because so much is known about him, and some of what is known is problematic and has to be addressed. But it is of course addressed in the most emotional, simplistic kind of way, merely communicating, “You must not hold it against him.” Why? Because “I trust that man, despite all.”

But it is on these extremely thin, grossly inadequate bases that we decide elections in this country.

Of COURSE Sanford wanted Jenny to run his campaign…

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The quirks of SC politics continue to fascinate national media.

The most recent edition of Slatest leads with Mark Sanford having wanted Jenny to run his congressional campaign.

Personally, when I heard that a week or two ago, I really didn’t think much of it. I was like, Of course he wanted her to run it; he has no clue how to run for office without her telling him what to do.

Jenny was always the brains in that outfit. Here’s my favorite anecdote illustrating that, which I’ve probably already told here before…

Early in the process of running for governor — probably in late 2001 or early 2002 — Sanford asked to come see the editorial board and tell us about his economic proposals (in a nutshell — reduce or eliminate the state income tax). Fine, we said. So when he came, Jenny came with him. I went down to greet them in the lobby, and Jenny handed me a basketful of cookies (message: I’m not Hillary). I was sufficiently nonplussed that I thanked her, then handed them back to her. Which wasn’t very gracious of me; I just wasn’t prepared to be presented with cookies (to which I’m allergic, anyway).

So I led them upstairs, Jenny still carrying the cookies. When we got to the boardroom and sat down and started the meeting, Mark said something like, “Jenny’s going to make the presentation; this is her plan, after all.” And she, having ditched the cookies somewhere along the line, proceeded to run us through a Powerpoint presentation.

Another anecdote, illustrating the way she ran his campaigns with an iron hand… I forget who told me this; it was probably either Tom Davis or Kevin Hall…

Anyway, they were running that same campaign out of the Sanfords’ Sullivan Island house. Whenever Jenny was mad at someone in the campaign and wanted to have a private chat to unburden her mind on the subject, she would have that campaign staffer meet her in a secluded part of the house. I think it was near the backdoor or something. Anyway, there was a rack for multiple hats on the wall in that location, loaded with the boys’ baseball caps and such.

Thus, when one campaign worker told another he’d been “taken to the hats,” it was understood that he was in the doghouse for the moment.

Anyway, it’s hard to imagine a Sanford campaign without Jenny, so his request is understandable on one level. The other thing to understand is what Josh Voorhees of The Slatest intuited: “that Mark Sanford still hasn’t figured out how personal relationships work.”

Anyway, the subject was brought up by this profile of Sanford in New York magazine, if you’d like to go read it.

How’d you like to own an original Ariail?

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Well, here’s your chance. Your last chance.

Robert’s having a show Thursday from 5-8 p.m. at City Art Gallery, and his originals are on sale. After that, he’s donating what’s left to the Hollings Library at USC.

Come on out, and bring your checkbook.

Woodward indicates he’s made Obama’s enemies list

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The scene in the movie in which Woodstein are told that their lives are in danger. Maybe if a movie is made about this latest threat, they can get Ricky Gervais to play Woodward…

I think maybe Bob Woodward’s feeling nostalgic for the days when he felt like he had to look over his shoulder to see whether G. Gordon Liddy was following him:

Today on CNN’s The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward told CNN that he has been threatened by White House staff over his budget cut challenge. Highlights from the interview are below; a full transcript will be posted on http://archives.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/sitroom.html.

MANDATORY CREDIT: CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer”

…

BLITZER: Who sent that e-mail to you?

WOODWARD: Well, I’m not going to say.

BLITZER: Was it a senior person at the White House?

WOODWARD: A very senior person. And just as a matter – I mean, it makes me very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters, you’re going to regret doing something that you believe in. And even though we don’t look at it that way, you do look at it that way. And I think if Barack Obama knew that was part of the communication’s strategy – let’s hope it’s not a strategy, but it’s a tactic that somebody’s employed, and said, look, we don’t go around trying to say to reporters, if you, in an honest way, present something we don’t like, that, you know, you’re going to regret this. And just – it’s Mickey Mouse…

Turns out that the “threat,” from economic adviser Gene Sperling, took this form:

Bob:

I apologize for raising my voice in our conversation today. My bad. I do understand your problems with a couple of our statements in the fall — but feel on the other hand that you focus on a few specific trees that gives a very wrong perception of the forest. But perhaps we will just not see eye to eye here.

But I do truly believe you should rethink your comment about saying saying that Potus asking for revenues is moving the goal post. I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim…

I agree there are more than one side to our first disagreement, but again think this latter issue is diffferent. Not out to argue and argue on this latter point. Just my sincere advice. Your call obviously.

My apologies again for raising my voice on the call with you. Feel bad about that and truly apologize.

Gene

That brute! Next time we need to find a bin Laden, we should let this guy interrogate the prisoners…

Now, even the folks over at the Post are making fun of their guy being “threatened.” I especially like the graphic, the “General Scale o’ Threateningness.“

Grooms running hard to catch Sanford in 1st District

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From where I sit, up here in Columbia (admittedly not the best vantage point), the person who seems to be running the hardest to catch Mark Sanford in the 1st Congressional District GOP primary is state Sen. Larry Grooms.

A day doesn’t pass that Hogan Gidley — last seen in these parts acting as spokesman for Rick Santorum — doesn’t send me a release or two on his behalf. Several in recent days have boasted about Tea Party congressmen Mick Mulvaney and Jeff Duncan endorsing him.

And this is the second TV ad for Grooms I’ve seen. Here’s the first.

Of course, it doesn’t really say anything to distinguish Grooms from anyone else (typical line from the ad: “I’m a pro-life Christian conservative who knows DC spends too much”), but when’s the last time you saw originality in one of these things?

E. J. Dionne: ‘The best choice for pope? A nun.’

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Over the weekend, E.J. Dionne — who does this sort of thing every week with David Brooks — was kind enough to write me and say he’d caught my bit on Weekend Edition Saturday on NPR, and “I wanted to tell you that you were excellent.”

Which, along with similarly kind plaudits I got from other friends and family, made my day.

While he had me, as a fellow RC he brought up Pope Benedict’s retirement, and asked whether I had read his “make a nun Pope” column.

I had not, but I went and read it immediately, and really enjoyed it. Excerpts:

In giving up the papacy, Pope Benedict XVI was brave and bold. He did the unexpected for the good of the Catholic Church. And when it selects a new pope next month, the College of Cardinals should be equally brave and bold. It is time to elect a nun as the next pontiff.

Now, I know this hope of mine is the longest of long shots. I have great faith in the Holy Spirit to move papal conclaves, but I would concede that I may be running ahead of the Spirit on this one…

Nonetheless, handing leadership to a woman — and in particular, to a nun — would vastly strengthen Catholicism, help the church solve some of its immediate problems and inspire many who have left the church to look at it with new eyes…

More than any other group in the church, the sisters have been at the heart of its work on behalf of compassion and justice. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times made this point as powerfully as anyone in a 2010 column. “In my travels around the world, I encounter two Catholic Churches,” he wrote. “One is the rigid all-male Vatican hierarchy that seems out of touch. . . . Yet there’s another Catholic Church as well, one I admire intensely. This is the grass-roots Catholic Church that does far more good in the world than it ever gets credit for. This is the church that supports extraordinary aid organizations like Catholic Relief Services and Caritas, saving lives every day, and that operates superb schools that provide needy children an escalator out of poverty.”…

Throughout history, it’s not uncommon for women to be brought in to put right what men have put wrong. A female pope would automatically be distanced from this past and could have a degree of credibility that a male member of the hierarchy simply could not…

And a church that has made opposition to abortion a central part of its public mission should consider that older men are hardly the best messengers for this cause. Perhaps a female pope could transform the discussion about abortion from one that is too often rooted in harsh judgments (and at times, anger with modernity) into a compassionate dialogue aimed at changing hearts and minds rather than changing laws.

Unborn children are vulnerable. So are pregnant women. In my experience, nuns are especially alive to these twin vulnerabilities…

There was a lot of other good stuff, about how consistent this would be with the church’s devotion to Mary, and other points. But I fear I may have exceeded the bounds of fair use already.

You might wonder, “Is Dionne kidding? He knows this can’t happen, right?” Yes, he knows it won’t happen, and no, he’s not kidding. At the least, he hopes “they at least consider electing the kind of man who has the characteristics of my ideal female pontiff.

I urge you to go read the whole, well-reasoned piece.

Did the WSJ’s editors do this on purpose?

NPR’s take on Lindsey Graham’s political situation

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I notice there was another SC story on Weekend Edition this morning, aside from my interview about Mark Sanford. It was their take on why Lindsey Graham’s been posturing so furiously on issues that endear him to the right, in the wake of his risky stepping out on immigration again:

It seems Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham has done his best in recent weeks to get as much ink as possible, talking about things that play well with the conservatives in his home state of South Carolina, like Benghazi and gun rights.

Graham also held up the nomination of Chuck Hagel as defense secretary to get more answers about what happened in Benghazi, even as he admitted Hagel had nothing to do with it. But his opposition might have more to do with home state politics than the nomination itself.

Republican senators who have shown moderate leanings have been hit with primary challenges from the right recently, and while no serious challenger has emerged yet in South Carolina, there are a whole lot of people hoping one does.

“There are some legitimate concerns to be asked about Benghazi … [and] Chuck Hagel,” says Tom Davis, a Republican state senator in South Carolina. “That being said, I do think it is fair to say that there has been a conscious effort on the part of Sen. Graham to elevate his role in those debates.”…

Don Gonyea didn’t ask me about this one in my interview, but if he had I would have said the obvious: That Tom Davis, whom they quote, was the threat from the right that everyone had expected, but that he says he’s not running.

But Graham’s still not taking any chances. After all, as we saw in 2010, especially in the 4th Congressional District, these days a successful challenge to a Republican incumbent can come out of nowhere.

Hear me on Weekend Edition tomorrow morning

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If you’re not sleeping in tomorrow morning, you might want to listen to Weekend Edition on NPR. I taped an interview with Don Gonyea this morning about the 1st Congressional District special election. [Update: You can listen to the interview here.]

That is, it was sort of about the 1st Congressional District special election.

Earlier in the week, I got a call from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation wanting to interview me about that race, and I begged off. I told them I just hadn’t been following it that closely.

When Brigid McCarthy called from NPR, I told her the same. But she said what they really wanted to do is talk about Mark Sanford.

That, I said, I can do.

And that’s mostly what we talked about.

But just in case, I did some reading up on the contest so I’d have a broad familiarity with it, in the event that we went beyond Sanford (which we did, a bit). That’s what led to this earlier blog post.

To update y’all from that post…

It’s looking to me like the GOP candidate running the hardest other than Sanford is Larry Grooms. Hogan Gidley, the former SC Republican Party executive director who in recent years has been associated with Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, has been sending me releases this week for Grooms, including one yesterday noting that Jeff Duncan and Mick Mulvaney (two of Tim Scott’s fellow Tea Party classmates of 2010) have endorsed him. And like Sanford, Grooms released a TV ad this week.

But then, maybe some of the other candidates are running just as hard, but don’t have my email address. If you’re out there, it’s brad@bradwarthen.com.

Also, I’ve sort of been operating on the assumption that the winner of the GOP contest will likely be Scott’s replacement, rather than Stephen Colbert’s sister. Republicans have held that seat since Tommy Hartnett won it on Reagan’s coattails in 1980. But… in 2008, the Democratic nominee came within a couple of points of winning. That was another coattails situation, though, in this case Barack Obama’s. There won’t be any Obama coattails operating this spring.

More than that, I checked this morning with someone who was fairly intimately involved in the most recent reapportionment. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the district is now safer for Republicans than it was in 2008.

One thing Graham definitely is NOT is dumb…

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Say what you want about the increasingly ubiquitous Lindsey Graham, Salon was way off the mark today when its header featured an unflattering photo of our senior senator next to the teaser hed, “Hagel’s dumbest enemies.”

Of course, as is often the case with such hyperbolic come-ons, the actual headline that the teaser linked to took it down a notch: “The increasingly ridiculous Hagel opposition.” The subhed, situated atop huge mugs of Graham and John McCain, begins, “Republicans block a vote for no reason…”

The very first paragraph of the body copy then refutes that (boldface added):

Sen. Graham and his best friend John McCain have been blocking the confirmation of Chuck Hagel as Defense secretary, because they want to know whether President Obama called the president of Libya the night of the Benghazi attack. While that’s not a very good reason to filibuster a Cabinet nominee, it is at least “a reason.” The White House has complied, giving Graham and McCain what they want. Graham’s response: Now he is just going to pointlessly delay the Hagel vote, because it will make him feel good. As always, with Lindsey Graham, being a senator is all about feelings.

Disagree with Graham — and McCain — all you want, but making him the poster boy of the “dumbest” is, well, pretty stupid.

I find a lot of the indignation on the left about delaying the Hagel nomination a few days a little on the disingenuous, even absurd, side. My least favorite manifestation of this is when I hear a Democrat express absolute mystification that these Republicans could possibly be objecting to Hagel, since he’s a Republican. There is no mystery as to why this is a Republican Democrats love. and Republicans have problems with him for the same reasons.

There are actual substantive reasons to question this nomination. We could start with his having been completely wrong on the Iraq surge. Which is kinda relevant in a candidate for SecDef. But then, of course, we’d have a whole other argument that we’ve had too many times before…

So never mind all that. I don’t call the president “dumb” for wanting a guy who looked at Iraq the way he did. I have more respect for the president than that.

But there’s a bigger reason I wouldn’t call Barack Obama dumb: I’ve heard him speak. And the same goes for Lindsey Graham.

I was speaking to a class at Lexington High School yesterday, and I let slip a comment that always makes me sound arrogant when I say it, but it’s true: It’s pretty unusual for me to interview a political officeholder in South Carolina who makes me think to myself, “This guy’s smarter than I am.” But I’ve had that thought more than once when talking with Lindsey Graham.

And I may have a host of faults — correction, I do have a host of faults — but being dumb isn’t one of them.