A Disgraceful Vote for “Reform” in the Middle of the Night

slow_d16I was up with a touch of insomnia last night — this morning, technically — and realized the time was approaching for the Senate’s “historic” 1 a.m. vote to expand government control of the health care system.  So I tuned in to C-SPAN and caught the tail end of the run-up to the 60-40 vote that everyone knew was coming.

Clad in my jammies after a long full day of morning church, afternoon snow shoveling and evening blogging, I watched Senators in their suits and neckties make their post-midnight pitches, and I was impressed once again by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.  Here are some excerpts, laboriously transcribed by moi (McConnell’s remarks begin about 39 minutes into the video):

The bill we’re voting on tonight will impact every American.  It will shape the future of our country. It will determine whether our children can afford the nation they will inherit.  It is one of the most consequential votes any of us will ever take, and none of us take it lightly.

But make no mistake – if the people who wrote this bill were proud of it, they wouldn’t be forcing this vote in the dead of night.

He touched on the “cheap deals” that were cut to win the crucial 60th vote from Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska:

One state out of 50 – one state out of 50 – gets to expand Medicaid at no cost to itself,  while taxpayers in the other 49 states pick up the tab.  The same Senator that cut that deal secured another one that benefits a single insurance company – just one insurance company, in his state.

He reviewed the long history of bipartisan support for groundbreaking social welfare acts — Social Security, Medicare, Americans with Disabilities Act, all passed with large majorities.

“Americans believe that on issues of this importance, one party should never be allowed to force its will on the other half of the nation.  The proponents of this bill felt differently.  In a departure from history, Democratic leaders put together a bill so heavy with tax hikes, Medicare cuts and government intrusion, that in the end their biggest problem wasn’t convincing Republicans to support it, it was convincing the Democrats.

In the end, the price of passing this bill wasn’t achieving the reforms Americans were promised.  It was a blind call to make history, even if it was a historical mistake.  Which is exactly what this bill will be if it is passed.  Because in the end, this debate isn’t about differences between two parties.  It’s about a $2.3 trillion dollar, 2,733-page health care reform bill that does not reform health care, and in fact makes the price of it go up.

The impact of this vote will long outlive this long, frantic, snowy weekend in Washington.  Mark my words, this legislation will reshape our nation.  And Americans have already issued their verdict – they don’t want it! They don’t like this bill!  And they don’t like lawmakers playing games with their health care to obtain the votes they need to pass it.

Majority Leader Harry Reid followed McConnell, and on the theory that people will believe a lie if it is repeated often enough, stated “Everyone knows we’re here at one in the morning because of my friends on the other side of the aisle.”  Byron York stayed up late after the vote to debunk that:

But the fact is, there is no reason the Reid Amendment vote could not have been held at a more reasonable hour. One a.m. Monday was the earliest moment that Senate rules allowed a vote, but there is no rule keeping the Senate from voting at some time after 1 a.m. If Reid had scheduled the vote for, say, 11 a.m. Monday, that would have been fine. If he scheduled it for 4 p.m. Monday, or 10 a.m. Tuesday, that would have been fine, too. But Reid is determined to pass the national health care bill by Christmas, and to do so he has to get the cloture vote on his amendment done at the earliest moment. The timeline is Reid’s and Reid’s alone.

The final vote is now scheduled for 7 p.m. on Christmas Eve, when the Web Goddess and I will be dining with friends at their home and preparing for church.  As with Porkulus, the Democrats are pushing for action now now now now now because they know that the more people learn about the bill, the less popular it will be.

Democrats will likely pay a heavy price in the 2010 election — Harry Reid is particularly vulnerable. Why would they choose that reality to pass a highly unpopular health care bill?  Kim Strassel had the answer the other day:

So why the stubborn insistence on passing health reform? Think big. The liberal wing of the party—the Barney Franks, the David Obeys—are focused beyond November 2010, to the long-term political prize. They want a health-care program that inevitably leads to a value-added tax and a permanent welfare state. Big government then becomes fact, and another Ronald Reagan becomes impossible. See Continental Europe.

The entitlement crazes of the 1930s and 1960s also caused a backlash, but liberal Democrats know the programs of those periods survived. They are more than happy to sacrifice a few Blue Dogs, a Blanche Lincoln, a Michael Bennet, if they can expand government so that in the long run it benefits the party of government.

Witnessing a Step Toward Marriage Equality in NJ

kirk-nina trenton lobbying copyThe Web Goddess and I journeyed to Trenton yesterday in support of marriage equality for same-sex couples.  (The picture makes me look fatter than I am.)

Pictured in the background is our priest, Father Bernie Poppe.  A Senate committee approved the bill, which is to be voted on by the full Senate on Thursday.

My account of yesterday’s events is at Maplewood Patch.  My previous blog post on this matter has touched off a lively debate in the comments.

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Lobbying for Marriage Equality in New Jersey

gaypridemarchT-blue copyThe Web Goddess and I are headed to Trenton Monday morning to lobby for pending legislation that would legalize same-sex marriage in New Jersey.  We’ll be car-pooling with friends both gay and straight from St. George’s Episcopal Church.

I’m covering the event for Maplewood Patch, a charter member of the Maplewood BlogolopolisTM.  Patch already has my preview story posted.

I’ll be wearing the snazzy T-shirt at left, designed by the Web Goddess of course, and available from Cafe Press.

This week is the last chance for at least four years to establish marriage equality legislatively in New Jersey.  If the state Senate Judiciary Committee votes the bill out of committee Monday, the full Senate is likely to vote on Thursday.  Democratic Governor Jon Corzine has said he would sign the bill.  Republican Governor-elect Chris Christie has said he would veto it.  At the committee hearing, the Right Reverend Mark M. Beckwith, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark and the Web Goddess’s boss, will be testifying in favor of the bill.

Torture, Euthanasia, and Decision-Making Without A Bright Line

Khalid_Shaikh_MohammedLawyers often talk about “bright-line rules.”  Example:  If you are at least 21 years old, you can legally buy liquor in the U.S.  If you will turn 21 when the clock strikes midnight tonight, you cannot. Never mind that certain 20-year-olds would be able to drink more responsibly than certain older people — there’s a bright-line rule.

Bright-line rules provide the comfort of easy decision-making. But many times there is no bright line, leaving people of good will to agonize about the lesser evil, often under intense pressure.

  • When does a ticking-time-bomb interrogation cross the line from harsh to torturous?
  • When does giving morphine to a dying patient cross the line from providing comfort to homicide?

The first question, of course, has been hotly debated for the past few years, with new information emerging this week. The second is cast in stark relief by an extraordinary 13,000-word cover story in the New York Times Magazine, about allegations of euthanasia in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

First things first: On Saturday, the Washington Post published a front-page article describing how valuable intelligence was gathered from Khalid Sheik Mohammed:

These scenes provide previously unpublicized details about the transformation of the man known to U.S. officials as KSM from an avowed and truculent enemy of the United States into what the CIA called its “preeminent source” on al-Qaeda. This reversal occurred after Mohammed was subjected to simulated drowning and prolonged sleep deprivation, among other harsh interrogation techniques.

KSM, an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate or incomplete,” according to newly unclassified portions of a 2004 report by the CIA’s then-inspector general released Monday by the Justice Department.

The debate over the effectiveness of subjecting detainees to psychological and physical pressure is in some ways irresolvable, because it is impossible to know whether less coercive methods would have achieved the same result. But for defenders of waterboarding, the evidence is clear: Mohammed cooperated, and to an extraordinary extent, only when his spirit was broken in the month after his capture March 1, 2003, as the inspector general’s report and other documents released this week indicate.

This was as close to a ticking-time-bomb scenario as you are likely to get in the real world:  The mastermind of 9/11 was replying “soon you will know” in response to questions about additional terror attacks.  It seems clear that specific terrorists were apprehended and actual American lives were saved based on the information KSM oh-so-reluctantly provided. The argument is over whether that justifies torturing him.

It’s hard to feel sympathy for KSM, but I’m troubled by the fact that techniques that arguably are torture seem to have been used on numerous prisoners.  However, at least in  the case of KSM, waterboarding was authorized and conducted in the belief, supported by legal counsel, that it fell short of torture.  We as a society seem to be deciding that waterboarding should not be permissible — but the desire by some on the Left to prosecute Bush Administration officials relies too much on the benefit of hindsight.

I’m struck by the parallels between this debate and the dying-patient issue, after reading Sheri Fink’s NYT Magazine cover story, the product of two and a half years of research.  After the Katrina floodwaters receded and 45 patients were found dead at Memorial Medical Center, an investigation was launched, focusing on patients who received morphine injections.

You really should read the whole thing, but because you probably won’t, here’s the key passage for this purpose:

Morphine, a powerful narcotic, is frequently used to control severe pain or discomfort. But the drug can also slow breathing, and suddenly introducing much higher doses can lead to death.

Doctors, nurses and clinical researchers who specialize in treating patients near the ends of their lives say that this “double effect” poses little danger when drugs are administered properly. [Dr. Ewing] Cook [of New Orleans’ Memorial Medical Center] says it’s not so simple. “If you don’t think that by giving a person a lot of morphine you’re not prematurely sending them to their grave, then you’re a very naïve doctor,” Cook told me when we spoke for the first time, in December 2007. “We kill ’em.”

In fact, the distinction between murder and medical care often comes down to the intent of the person administering the drug. Cook walked this line often as a pulmonologist, he told me, and he prided himself as the go-to man for difficult end-of-life situations. When a very sick patient or the patient’s family made the decision to disconnect a ventilator, for example, Cook would prescribe morphine to make sure the patient wasn’t gasping for breath as the machine was withdrawn.

Often Cook found that achieving this level of comfort required enough morphine that the drug markedly suppressed the patient’s breathing. The intent was to provide comfort, but the result was to hasten death, and Cook knew it. To Cook, the difference between something ethical and something illegal “is so fine as to be imperceivable.”

The article does a masterful job of taking the reader through the thought processes and decisions involved in triaging patients as the floodwaters rose, knowing some of them will die either because of the conditions or from the stress of evacuation.  Faced with an evacuation order and a shortage of helicopters, medical personnel had to decide whether to leave dying patients alive but unattended, or to hasten the inevitable with a large dose of morphine.

Although a grandstanding attorney general called some of the deaths “simple homicide” and staged SWAT-team arrests, a grand jury ultimately refused to issue any indictments against medical personnel at the hospital.

I think declining to indict was the right call in New Orleans — and I think it would be the right call regarding the Bush Administration’s use of harsh interrogation techniques, or torture if you prefer.  People in unique situations and under incredible life-and-death pressure have to have some latitude in choosing the lesser evil.

(I told the Web Goddess what I was writing about, and she said she thought the analogy between the two situations was “tortured.”  What do you think?)

These scenes provide previously unpublicized details about the transformation of the man known to U.S. officials as KSM from an avowed and truculent enemy of the United States into what the CIA called its “preeminent source” on al-Qaeda.

This reversal occurred after Mohammed was subjected to simulated drowning and prolonged sleep deprivation, among other harsh interrogation techniques.

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“KSM, an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate or incomplete,” according to newly unclassified portions of a 2004 report by the CIA’s then-inspector general released Monday by the Justice Department.

The debate over the effectiveness of subjecting detainees to psychological and physical pressure is in some ways irresolvable, because it is impossible to know whether less coercive methods would have achieved the same result. But for defenders of waterboarding, the evidence is clear: Mohammed cooperated, and to an extraordinary extent, only when his spirit was broken in the month after his capture March 1, 2003, as the inspector general’s report and other documents released this week indicate.

“Porkulus” Was a Travesty, but “Cash for Clunkers” is Kosher

CashForClunkersI wasn’t aware of the “Cash for Clunkers” program until today, when they started talking about ending it prematurely because it was running out of money.  I’m not in a position to take advantage of the program  personally, but I’m glad that it looks like Congress will add more money to it.  I think the concept is brilliant — if the rest of the bloated and dishonest “stimulus” legislation had been more like this, I’d stop calling it the Porkulus bill.

Many conservatives argue that there should not have been a stimulus bill at all.  I tend to agree, and I certainly respect the principles on which that argument is made.  However, the simple political reality is that there was zero chance that the government would refrain from using stimulus spending in an attempt to revitalize the economy.

But while I think any stimulus spending may have been misguided, I’d be done talking about it if the legislation had been a pure stimulus package.  The thing I find infuriating is the uncontestable fact that much of the money will not be spent until 2011 or later.  It is fundamentally dishonest to pretend that the purpose of such spending is to stimulate the economy now.

That’s why I love the Cash for Clunkers program.  People commit to spending money right now, then they wait for the rebate.  It gives a boost to the auto industry (and remember, you and I now OWN a significant chunk of that industry).  It gets older, less efficient vehicles off the road in favor of more fuel-efficient models.  Perhaps best of all, it lets individual citizens decide whether they personally want to participate in the program. Win, win, win, win.

Of course, some conservatives see it differently.  On Planet Gore, National Review Online’s anti-environmentalist blog, Henry Payne weighs in:

Worse, Democratic demands that the guzzlers be permanently shredded means that already hurting used-car and -parts businesses will suffer. By insisting that the cars not only be crushed — but also that their engines be disabled — Congress’s decree will penalize the industry at time when a dozen U.S. parts suppliers have filed for bankruptcy this year. […]

The victims will be lower-income Americans who typically buy only used parts and vehicles. “Now you’re removing cars people could afford, and they’re not available anymore,” says Norm Wright, a Denver recycler. “There will be fewer cars to pull from, so the price of parts will go up.

Pish and tosh.  This strikes me as Obama Derangement Syndrome, or maybe Government Derangement Syndrome — the idea that any initiative by one’s political “enemies” must be not just opposed, but also attacked and belittled.  Once it becomes inevitable that there is going to be an attempt to stimulate through government spending, Cash for Clunkers is about as good as it gets.

The original program included  “only” $1 billion for rebates.  Now the House has voted to add $2 billion.  Those amounts alone have no meaningful stimulative effect.  But surely other sensible stimulative initiatives could have been devised.

At the risk of sounding like a Republican,  the most effective way to stimulate the economy would have been… wait for it… a tax cut.  No, not a “tax cut for the rich” — a tax cut aimed directly at middle-class and lower-middle-class wage earners and business owners.  I’m talking about cutting Social Security taxes — the most regressive form of taxation there is.

I don’t recall where I first heard this idea — probably one of the political podcasts I listen to on the treadmill.  But the more I think through the implications, the more I like the concept.  The Social Security portion of FICA — currently 6.2% on the first $106,800 of annual wages earned — is more regressive even than the sales tax, because there’s no cap on the sales tax.

slow_d16It’s too late now — the Democrats already rammed through their Christmas-tree porkulus package, and the president put the lie to the idea that it had to be passed now now now now now by waiting days to sign it.  But if the main point is to pump money into the economy, why not temporarily reduce that tax by, say, 1 point?  Sure that creates a greater Social Security deficit in the future… but Porkulus increases a different deficit, and it’s not as efficient in creating short-term spending.

A Social Security tax cut could have become effective as quickly as employers could adjust their payroll calculations.  Because of the very nature of the tax, it benefits lower-income people more than it benefits the “rich.”  If the only way to get Democratic support to pass such a bill were to make sure none of the filthy, immoral, $106,801-earning Plutocrats got a single dime of benefit, you could even phase out the temporary tax cut at higher income levels.  Of course, you could also couple such a tax cut with a much smaller, better designed spending program.

Would some people undermine the stimulation by saving the extra bucks rather than spending them?  Sure.  But a LOT of the money would get spent… and the part that is “wasted” by being saved would at least be going into the savings accounts of individuals, who could make their own eventual decisions on how to spend it.

I’m not recommending this now — I’m opposed with every fiber of my being to any additional “stimulus” effort before what we’ve already done has a chance to filter through the economy.

But am I missing something?  Why would this not have been a better idea?

(Illustration by the Web Goddess)

God Knows: An IED in Iraq Shows Who, How, and Why We Fight

IED_detonator 400The Web Goddess, who truly is a Renaissance Woman, is fascinated by neurology. She hungrily devours any book or article for general audiences about how the brain and central nervous system work.

If you share that interest at all, I highly recommend the story she flagged for me this morning, which was in yesterday’s New York Times Science section.

I find the story gripping for an entirely different reason, about which more to come.

It turns out that when it comes to Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), fancy American technology is great, but there’s no substitute for the instincts of (certain) American soldiers.

[H]igh-tech gear, while helping to reduce casualties, remains a mere supplement to the most sensitive detection system of all — the human brain. Troops on the ground, using only their senses and experience, are responsible for foiling many I.E.D. attacks, and, like Sergeant Tierney, they often cite a gut feeling or a hunch as their first clue.

Everyone has hunches — about friends’ motives, about the stock market, about when to fold a hand of poker and when to hold it. But United States troops are now at the center of a large effort to understand how it is that in a life-or-death situation, some people’s brains can sense danger and act on it well before others’ do.

“Sergeant Tierney” refers to a soldier who saved the life of a comrade one summer morning by sensing that something was wrong on a nearly deserted street in Mosul.  The article opens with a scene-setter about a soldier under Tierney’s command who sought permission to give some water to two Iraqi kids in a closed car on a 120-degree day.

The 2,100-word article makes you wait to the very end to learn what happened, but you can guess the outcome.  Sergeant Tierney denied permission for the humanitarian gesture — and when the soldier turned around to fall back, the car was exploded remotely.  The unidentified soldier suffered only minor injuries — but the two young Iraqi boys, of course, suffered the fate their elders intended.

Sort of puts waterboarding a known mass murderer into perspective, doesn’t it?

My point here (and I don’t necessarily speak for the Web Goddess) is not to advocate waterboarding, a practice I oppose.  To paraphrase a recent American president, my point is that good and evil both exist in the world — and the God of my understanding is not neutral between them.

That’s right: I believe God is on our side, in a war against an enemy that has perverted a major global religion.

America is not perfect.  Americans are not perfect.  But to quote an unsuccessful recent presidential candidate (who also opposes waterboarding), “America is the greatest force for good in the history of the world.”  I would tack on: “this side of the Almighty.”

Some will argue that a belief in God’s blessing is exactly the kind of self-justifying mindset that leads to excesses like waterboarding.  I think the opposite is true.

Our society has a passionate yearning for God’s approval (or for my secular friends, a yearning to be Good).  That yearning leads us to wrenching but necessary national debates about the precise point where interrogation goes too far — while our enemies deliberately murder two young co-religionists in an effort to take advantage of our humanitarian instinct.

Never forget.

(Public domain photo of IED detonator from Wikimedia Commons)

How “Blue” is New Jersey — and for How Long?

I market my blog as the musings of “a red-state voter in a deep blue state.”  It’s a catchy line, and it lends itself to a jazzy 125×125 logo — created by the Web Goddess, naturally. But sometimes I’ve wondered if New Jersey really is as “deep blue” as, say, Massachusetts or Vermont.  (I’m sure as heck in a deep blue town.)

KP-EntreCard 129Then today I saw this from fellow New Jersey blogger TigerHawk:  “Forty-nine states have elected a Republican to state-wide office since New Jersey last did.”  So by that metric, at least, it’s the bluest state in the nation.

The irony of my self-identification is that in the current governor’s race, I’m almost certainly going to vote for the Democrat — who probably is going to lose.  Which would make me a red-state voter turning blue in a blue state turning red.

I went looking for more info on New Jersey’s red/blue divide and found this from PolitickerNJ:

The last time a Republican statewide candidate won New Jersey was in 1997 [Christie Whitman’s re-election].  Since then, 49 other states have elected a Republican to a statewide office. But also consider this: the last time New Jersey re-elected a Democratic governor was 32 years ago [Brendan Byrne’s re-election].

One of those two streaks will end this year. As of this week, Republican Chris Christie leads Democrat Jon Corzine by a wide margin, 53-41 percent.

My slogan and party affiliation incline me toward Christie, and I’m impressed by his law enforcement record as the state’s U.S. Attorney.  Earlier this year, a friend who follows my blog suggested I get involved in the Christie campaign, and I looked into that. The deal-breaker was his strong stands against abortion rights and against marriage equality for same-sex couples.  (I was on the other side of those issues from McCain as well, but in a presidential election, national security trumps all else in my mind.)

On marriage equality especially, the choice in New Jersey is stark.  Corzine supports “full marriage equality and is committed to signing marriage equality legislation in 2009.”  Christie says on his website:

If a bill legalizing same sex marriage came to my desk as Governor, I would veto it. If the law were changed by judicial fiat, I would be in favor of a constitutional amendment on the ballot so that voters, not judges, would decide this important social question.

Sorry, no sale.  Maplewood, my home for 10 years, has a high concentration of gay residents.  My gay friends, neighbors and fellow parishioners deserve the same marriage rights that the Web Goddess and I enjoy.

Christie hammers Corzine for raising taxes, and says he’ll cut them.  Fair enough… but I don’t see Corzine as a spendthrift.  From Corzine’s website:

Governor Corzine reshaped and resized state government. He eliminated and consolidated departments, sold state cars, tore up gas cards and closed office buildings. He reduced the state workforce by 7,000 employees and achieved additional savings by increasing the retirement age from 55 to 62, capping pensions, and asking state workers to contribute for the first time toward the cost of their health care. This year, he even negotiated a 7.5 percent wage cut for public employees.

Because Jon Corzine made the right choices, he is the only New Jersey governor in over six decades to reduce the size of state government. The budget that he signed into law on June 29th is $1.8 billion smaller than the first budget he signed in 2006.

Sounds good to me.  Besides, I kinda like the guy.  Maybe it’s the beard.

A Tip for Business Owners Navigating in a “Jobless Recovery”

The economy is sending mixed signals — which at least is an improvement over just a few months ago.  Newsweek reports today that “the Fed has become both more optimistic and more pessimistic,” with GNP expected to recover slightly more quickly than previously expected, even while unemployment creeps slightly higher.  The term “jobless recovery” is being attributed to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, although the term actually was floated by a Senate Republican in a private discussion, and Bernanke responded only that “it could be.”

The bottom line is, whatever you have left in your retirement fund may start growing again, but if you’re looking for a job you’re still hosed.

The irony, of course, is that job creation depends on business confidence, which depends on economic growth, which in the long run depends on… higher employment levels.

will_write_for_foodSo for all you business owners looking to implement plans you’ve had on hold, if you’re still understandably wary of taking on new headcount, I have a solution:  Hire an independent consultant on a contract basis.

Contracting with a consultant is a much smaller commitment than hiring an employee, and your dollars will go further.  An independent consultant will know that he or she has to hit the ground running, so you can get a faster payoff on your project.

Huge consulting firms often use a senior partner to convince you to sign a contract, then assign twenty-somethings to do the actual work.  But with an independent consultant, the person you seal the deal with will be doing the actual work.  So don’t be put off by the fact that the independent consultant may be a little older — a greybeard, so to speak. You’re not buying all those years of experience, you’re just renting them.

This message is brought to you as a public service by KirkPetersen.net LLC.

(Disclosure: Photo is a composite — NOT created by the Web Goddess, who has actual Photoshop skills)

Going Back to Old Nassau

The Class of 1980 has what counts as a muted and tasteful class costume, by Princeton standards."

The Class of 1980 has what counts as a muted and tasteful class costume, by Princeton standards, with line drawings of Nassau Hall as design elements.

Today I had the high privilege and distinct honor of fighting the wind with the parade banner for the Princeton Class of 1980, leading a hardy band of quintagenerians in an off-year reunion march at the “Best Damn Place of All,” in the words of the song.

My senior picture.  Sheesh.

My senior picture. Sheesh.

When asked which side of the banner I would like to hold, I promptly said “I should have the right,” as the lovely Web Goddess rolled her Obama-supporting eyes.

The P-rade is an annual pilgrimage for me — since graduation I have never lived more than an hour away from campus, and while I haven’t made it back  every year, I’m sure I’ve been to more than 20 of my 29 reunions.  After the P-rade I always swing by The Daily Princetonian picnic, but this year I was disappointed at not finding any of the folks I worked with when I got my start as a writer.

I did see an old Princetonian friend earlier in the day, when Joel Achenbach ’82 ably moderated a panel titled “Money, Greed and the Economy: Views from the Fourth Estate.”  In addition to his day job as a reporter and columnist at the Washington Post, Joel is the Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Princeton Alumni Weekly, which sponsored the panel, and where I got one of my first actual paychecks as a freelance (I repurposed my Junior Paper about the arrival of casino gambling in Atlantic City, I think I got $100 for the article, which never ran).

Columnist George Will sat three spots away from tormentor Josh Marshall

Columnist George Will sat three spots away from tormentor Josh Marshall

The panel featured George F. Will *68 (the asterisk indicating a graduate degree) as the headliner.  The advance program advertised Katrina vanden Heuvel ’81, editor of The Nation; she was a no-show, but the Obstreperous Lefty chair was ably filled by Josh Marshall ’91 of Talking Points Memo, who seemed to take delight in sniping at George Will.   After accusing Will of having “an ideological stake” in what he was saying — pot, meet kettle –  he boasted that he was “the only business owner on the panel, I meet a payroll, I don’t just write a column.” Will replied mildly that his GFW Inc. meets a payroll — it appears to have six employees.

The discussion was interesting — Will got a laugh when he said the press generally has not focused on the “300 million real culprits” behind the economic collapse.  Peter Slevin ’78, the Washington Post’s Chicago bureau chief, told of interviewing people with $25,000 salaries who had $400,000 mortgages, as part of a lively discussion on personal responsibility and perverse banking incentives.

All in all, a long and tiring day, under beautiful blue skies, low humidity, and a nice breeze that I enjoyed once I stopped carrying the banner.  Next year is my 30th reunion, and there will be more classmates in attendance.  I’ve heard it said that no other university in the country makes as big a deal about reunions as Princeton, and I think that may well be true.

(Reunions photos by the Web Goddess)

I Love the Look, Newsweek — But About Those Horizontal Photos…

dick-takes-manhattanThe latest Newsweek just arrived by snail mail, and I have to say I’m lovin’ the new design.  Bigger, bolder photographs… a more elegant (and yet readable!) typeface… informative fun with graphics in the “Back Story,” which Editor Jon Meacham describes as “a visual dissection or explanation of an important issue or phenomenon that will satisfy one’s curiosity or pique interest.”

The redesign is part of a broader effort to find a business model for print journalism that works.  The existing model is in deep trouble, especially with regard to newspapers.  The mighty New York Times saw fit to pay $1.1 billion in 1993 for the Boston Globe. getting-to-know-obamaBut now the entire company — which in addition to those two major dailies includes more than a dozen other U.S. dailies, the International Herald Tribune and a bunch of other stuff  like Fenway Park and the Red Sox — the whole company is worth less than $1 billion, and in recent weeks resorted to threatening to shut down the Globe to win union concessions.

Meacham essentially says that Newsweek is getting out of the business of trying to break news. They’re going to take advantage of the relatively contemplative pace of their weekly publication to pursue “the reported narrative” and “the argued essay.”

What is displaced by these categories? The chief casualty is the straightforward news piece and news written with a few (hard-won, to be sure) new details that does not move us significantly past what we already know. Will we cover breaking news? Yes, we will, but with a rigorous standard in mind: Are we truly adding to the conversation? When violence erupts in the Middle East, are we saying something original about it? Are our photographs and design values exceptional? If the answers are yes, then we are in business.

Print publications that survive will be the ones that find a way to exploit the benefits of the printed medium.  Now and forever, timeliness is going to favor the Internet.  But the web just can’t provide the kind of visual feast that a well-designed magazine can.  The inaugural episode of the aforementioned “Back Story” feature, for example, graphically shows 15 purchases that could all be made with the Obama Administration’s $3.5 trillion 2010 federal budget, starting with “everything produced in Italy in 2008” and ending with an overpriced $8.50 burrito in Manhattan.

back-story-smallIt’s fun, it’s evocative, it makes a powerful point about federal spending.  But you’re going to have to buy the current Newsweek or squint at the little scanned image at left — I can’t link to Back Story because it’s not online.  An intricate, full-page graphic just can’t work online in the same quick-read kind of way as it works in print.

The print version also makes use of photography in a way that is more difficult online.  Full-page and two-page photos come to life on paper, but photos that large online would load slowly and expose the inherent visual limitations of the web.

For reasons not clear to me, they passed up an opportunity to repurpose at least some of their photos for the web.  The two graphics at the top of the column both click through to the web versions of the respective columns… but on the web, you won’t see the extremely horizontal photographs captured in the screen grabs above.  That kind of extreme horizontal actually does work well on the web.

st_g_homepageAnd here is where I finally get to the REAL point of this post.  J’accuse, NewsweekI know the source of the inspiration for the extreme horizontals.  The lovely Web Goddess posted the updated St. George’s Episcopal Church website more than a week ago — don’t tell me that’s not where you got the idea!

That’s right, this homage to Newsweek is actually an excuse to wander back into the Maplewood BlogolopolisTM and show off my wife’s handiwork.

st_g_social_justice1The Web Goddess created St. George’s website with a handful of pages in March 2001, and has continuously enlarged and improved it ever since. It’s by far the largest church website in the Diocese of Newark, all created by one volunteer who taught herself HTML, CSS and Javascript.

In the process, the Web Goddess amassed a trove of literally thousands of photographs of St. George’s events. Some were taken by other parishioners, but many of them (including the three you see here) she took herself, with the cameras her loving husband bought her.

st_g_ponyIn recent months she felt the existing design was starting to look tired, and she wanted to expand her web skills.  So she recoded the entire site from the ground up to improve performance and make use of all those wonderful pictures. Each of the three screen grabs here links to a different section of the website, and on any page of the site you can scroll through photos with the arrows at the top of the header. All of this she accomplished outside of working hours while working full-time. (Did I mention I’m proud of her?)

So, nice job, Newsweek — but the Web Goddess was out with her redesign first.

(Regarding the horizontal photos, in the interests of full disclosure, the Web Goddess tips her hat to the website of St. Olaf College.)