Brad Warthen's Blog

Taking dumb to new depths

Remember when I had some dismissive things to say a few months ago about the aggressively stupid promos I get on my laptop regularly from the "Real Message Center?" I've noticed lately, during those split-seconds it takes to close that box when it pops up, that they've been getting worse and worse.

At least before, there was something from time to time that at least looked like something a reasonably intelligent person who wants to keep up with entertainment news (you may consider that to be a contradiction in terms, but there is a small set of such people) might want to click on, such as clips from a new movie or something. But check out today's offerings:

• Pop Starlets: Beautiful and Dumb
• Celeb Love Connections + Amazing Race 13
• Sexy Brunettes + Wild Musicians

And yes, I know one of y'all was kind enough to tell me how to turn this thing off so I don't get the pop-ups any more, but most days it only takes a second or less of my time, and I've gotten to the point of morbid fascination now. I don't watch Reality TV, so this gives me a way to track the degradation of the culture. How will they top (or should I say "bottom") themselves? I expect at some point to see a come-on about sacrificing hot, sexy Christians to lions with laser beams attached to their heads...

The United States of France

A thoughtful reader shared this with me, from TIME magazine:

How We Became the United States of France

By Bill Saporito Sunday, Sep. 21, 2008
This is the state of our great republic: We've nationalized the financial system, taking control from Wall Street bankers we no longer trust. We're about to quasi-nationalize the Detroit auto companies via massive loans because they're a source of American pride, and too many jobs — and votes — are at stake. Our Social Security system is going broke as we head for a future in which too many retirees will be supported by too few workers. How long before we have national health care? Put it all together, and the America that emerges is a cartoonish version of the country most despised by red-meat red-state patriots: France. Only with worse food.

Note the piece that the phrase "We've nationalized the financial system" links to. That one photo of Henry Paulson is rapidly becoming ubiquitous. I used it for the Daddy Warbucks thing, and I also put it on tomorrow's op-ed page with a column by Robert Samuelson headlined "Paulson's panic."

Hey, that's the United States of Freedom to you, mon ami.

The Granny within us all

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
KILLING TIME during my too-short stay at the beach over the summer, I flipped on the tube and vegged out briefly over an episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies:”
    Granny became suspicious of banker Milburn Drysdale. To reassure her, Jed accompanied her to the bank and asked that Mr. Drysdale show Granny her money. Mr. Drysdale sputtered that he didn’t have it, that it had been invested, that it would take weeks to gather that much cash. Jed, deeply disappointed, soberly told him he’d best do so right quick; Granny felt bitterly vindicated in her lack of trust.
    Oh, those silly, unsophisticated Clampetts! What a laugh! They thought those millions were in actual notes and coins in the vault! What rubes.
    Too lowbrow for you? Consider Shakespeare’s Polonius, who advises Laertes:

    Neither a borrower, nor a lender be;
    For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
    And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry....

    Oh, that silly, pompous old windbag and his cliches! If he’d minded his own business, “Hamlet” wouldn’t have turned out as a tragedy.
    Of course one cannot have a modern economy without a whole heap of borrowing and lending — only the richest of us could own homes, or go to college, or drive cars; businesses couldn’t grow; factories would shut down for the lack of raw materials. No one could trade in stocks or commodities.
    And all wealth is based on the sort of trust that Granny was so reluctant to extend to Mr. Drysdale. Most who have achieved middle-class status seldom hold in their wallets an amount equal to even a single paycheck. If you do direct deposit, your compensation consists of 1s and Os transferred from one financial institution to another, and the only reason your debit card works at the grocery store is that everyone involved, from your employer to your bank to the store, plus various middlemen, trusts that those blips of data represent something of real and quantifiable value.
    And yet, it seems that on some level, the crisis on Wall Street that so threatens our entire economy is the result of major financial institutions not having sufficient assets to balance their debts — no cash to show Granny, even given time to gather it, in terms I can understand — leading the normally trusting Jeds of the world to say “Hold on!” to such an extent that Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke saw all borrowing and lending about to come to a screeching halt. In the prosaic wording of The Wall Street Journal over the weekend, what those officials saw was “the circulatory system of the U.S. economy — credit markets — starting to fail.”
    So it was that Messrs. Paulson and Bernanke went to Congress late last week to ask for a $700 billion bailout of our financial infrastructure.
    Congress was at first deeply impressed. Speaking of a presentation by Mr. Paulson, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said, “When you listened to him describe it, you gulped.” Over the weekend, though, the usual sorts of reflexes kicked in, questions were raised, and more than one voice said, “Hold on.”
    As one who would have trouble coming up with $700 on such short notice, I find myself wondering whom I trust in all this. And I wonder that even as I remain convinced that I must trust someone. In fact, the restoration of a healthy state of affairs seems to my mean understanding dependent on a multilateral restoration of trust throughout the system.
    On Monday morning, I read everything I could get my hands on trying to decide what I think Congress should do. Unfortunately, everything I read caused me to question whether I trusted the source.
If Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke know what they’re doing, how did things get this bad? Congressional Democrats make sense when they say the bad behavior of executives at these failed financial firms should not be rewarded by the taxpayers, but how much of that is populist demagoguery? And conservatives are right to say that there are limits to the extent that government can shield us from risk and consequences, but at what point do their objections become mere ideological pedantry in the face of a crisis of this proportion?
    Consider the piece on the opposite page by Paul Krugman. I chose it because it broke down the situation into elements even I could understand. But given his oft-demonstrated animus toward the Bush administration, am I at all surprised that he concludes that he doesn’t like its plan?
    The really awful thing is that it was trusting the experts — from the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street to an administration headed by, as Gail Collins of The New York Times wrote over the weekend, “the-first-president-with-an-MBA-and-a-lot-of-good-it-did-us” — that got us here.
    The even awfuler thing is that our only way out of this mess is to trust. We have to rely upon the “experts” in the administration, and members of Congress and their staffs, to draft the right plan and make it work. And then we have to trust our bankers and brokers and each other going forward, or nothing the government can do can get our economy back on its feet.
    That means we’re going to have to hush up the Granny within us, and given present circumstances, that’s not going to be easy.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

The twits who exposed Sarah Palin's e-mail

Well, you've got to love the irony here. Being busy putting out editorial pages, interviewing legislative candidates and reading about the Wall Street collapse and the energy bill in Congress when I had time to keep up with the news, I missed the stupid human trick of someone hacking into Sarah Palin's personal e-mail. Someone mentioned it to me over lunch.

And here's the schlag atop the dessert. The weasels who did this called themselves "Anonymous." Expose someone else's correspondence and not have the guts to attach your own name to it? Wow.

There are, of course, people on the right trying to make it look like Obama's folks did this. No way. Obama's got too much class for that.

So now I'm bailing out something called AIG?

A little while ago I got a release from Jim DeMint that said in part:

Americans should be very concerned by the size and frequency of these government bailouts...

Well, I am, Jim -- I am. And I'd really like to see someone give me an intelligible explanation of why it was important for me, as a taxpayer who'd rather see his money spent on Iraq or universal healthcare, am bailing out yet another private company.

First Bear Stearns. Now AIG. Presumably, this was another company "too big too fail," which evokes the obvious response, "evidently not." Let's see -- we had to bail out Bear Stearns (and I still don't know why). We didn't have to bail out Lehman; we let that go into bankruptcy (another form of relief our government offers). We let the marketplace deal with Merrill Lynch -- specifically, another private company bought it. And now, ta-da!, another private company is buying Lehman. The market at work, one would think.

So why AIG? I get Fannie and Freddie; as little as I understand about High Finance, I always understood them to have a special relationship to the government. If nothing else, you couldn't let them go under for the same reason a Mob boss can't let a made guy get whacked without doing something about it. You lose respect, both on your own turf and abroad. You gotta do something; you got no choice.

But why AIG? I don't get it.

If we DO have a run on the banks, can I be George Bailey?

After posting my last post, I went to find this scene from "It's a Wonderful Life" -- one of my All-Time, All-Category, Top Five Movies (in fact, I listed it on the blog as my No. 1, but I go back and forth on that). Interesting thing, when I went to YouTube and typed in the title, the bank run scene came up second -- which makes me think others have that scene on their minds.

Surely things aren't that bad, are they?

Well, if it does come to that, can I be George Bailey? I want to be the reassuring guy who says, "Just remember that this thing isn't as black as it appears," just before the sirens go by. Then I can say,

No, but you're... you're, you're-you're thinkin' of this place all wrong, as if I had the money back in a safe. Th-th-The money's not here... why, your money's in Joe's house, that's right next to yours, and in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Maitland's house, and, and a hundred others. ... Why, you're lending them the money to build, and then they're gonna pay it back to you as best they can, now what're you gonna do, foreclose on them?

I've always enjoyed that, a nice communitarian lesson in how a healthy community operates economically.

Of course, if you'd rather get 50 cents on the dollar from that free-market monster Mr. Potter, wull-wull-wull go right ahead, but don't then don't come crying to ol' George Bailey... No, wait: I guess George wouldn't say that, would he?

The run on gas stations: Will banks be next?

Thursday evening one of my daughters called me; she was over at USC studying, and wanted to know if she should run out and get some gas for her aged car (which doesn't get the best mileage). She had been told that it would go up to $5 a gallon by midnight.

I told her not to worry about it (she had half a tank). We were all just going to have to get used to higher gas prices, because they're only going to keep ratcheting up. Getting a few gallons at a lower price this once wasn't going to make a noticeable difference in the long run.

On the way home that night, I saw the queues of cars out into the streets. Of course, those twits -- the hoarders -- are the reason some stations are out today. Looks like some of us will be carpooling for the next week or so, which is not a bad thing (from an Energy Party perspective), just irritating.

But a run on the gas stations is one thing. Will the banks be next, in this pessimistic environment? I saw this in the WSJ this morning:

The crisis gripping the nation's financial system deepened, with Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. racing to sell itself over the weekend and other major U.S. institutions scrambling to show they have the financial wherewithal to ride out the crisis.

Potential buyers of Lehman were heading toward a standoff with federal officials Friday. Firms weighing offers for the battered investment bank sought financial assistance, while Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has been unwilling to support a government-led bailout, people familiar with the situation say. The weekend's negotiations over Lehman's fate could define the next chapter of the government's handling of the crisis.

Friday's unease spread beyond Lehman. Shares of American International Group Inc., the giant insurer, fell more than 30%. Standard & Poor's said it might lower its credit ratings on AIG because of its tumbling share price and the increasing yield on its debt instruments compared with safe government Treasurys. (See related article.)

Now I don't care much about Lehman; I don't know what it is any more than I understand the Bear Stearns thing. But that "spreading crisis" talk seems to me a cause for concern.

MSNBC: Two perspectives

This morning Samuel Tenenbaum joined me at my breakfast table as I was having my second cup, the first time I'd seen him since before the Democratic Convention. But what was on his mind was a shake-up at MSNBC, which he had read about in the NYT this morning. An excerpt:

MSNBC tried a bold experiment this year by putting two politically incendiary hosts, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, in the anchor chair to lead the cable news channel’s  coverage of the election.

That experiment appears to be over.

After months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network NBC, the channel decided over the weekend that the NBC News correspondent and MSNBC host David Gregory would anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage.

The change — which comes in the home stretch of the long election cycle — is a direct result of tensions associated with the channel’s perceived shift to the political left.

Samuel saw this as the news media caving in to political pressure on the right. I told him I had no opinion on the subject other than that my uniformly low opinion of cable TV "news" in general. It's nothing but a bunch of talking heads who play an integral role, along with the staffs of ideological interest groups, in the intellectually offensive polarization of America. Samuel agreed, noting that he watches them less and less -- but the NYT story still disturbed him.

He would have been far MORE disturbed by the cover story of the National Review I found on my desk when I got in today: "Barack Obama's Pet Peacock." Expecting a piece alleging that MSNBC leans Obama-ward, I turned to it and found something that went way beyond that:

Despite what you may have heard, Olbermann’s MSNBC is not becoming a network for liberals — not for your average hybrid-driving, New Yorker–reading, fair-trade-coffee-drinking liberals, anyway. Those liberals already have networks: They have ABC, CBS, CNN, National Public Radio, as well as Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and its mock-talk counterpart, The Colbert Report.

No. Under Olbermann, MSNBC is becoming something different. It is becoming a network for people who write furious diatribes on group blogs like Daily Kos; who think that President Bush should be indicted for war crimes; who use phrases like “vast right-wing conspiracy” unironically — a network for people who agree that the Republican party has reduced to lapdogs most of the journalists at ABC, CBS, and CNN, to say nothing of the contemptible Fox News. MSNBC was a liberal network. It is now in the process of becoming a network for the far Left.

Wow. I wonder who's right. Does the truth lie somewhere between Samuel's worrying and the NR's indictment? Or somewhere else altogether.

I haven't the slightest idea. Keith Olberman was a new name to me. I can't even picture the guy. Chris Matthews I'm familiar with, if only from having seen him impersonated on SNL for years. But on Olberman I draw a blank.

Community organizers strike back

I'm beginning to suspect that community organizers are organized on a level somewhat larger than the "community."

The first letter on tomorrow's editorial page sticking up for community organizers as a breed. Last week, within a day after Sarah Palin's remark about their ilk vis-a-vis being a mayor, I got TWO e-mails sticking up for community organizers. Then, when I got home Friday, there was a panel discussion on PBS, and the person speaking when I walked into the room was defending community organizers.

The two e-mail releases came in within two hours of each other on Thursday. Here's the first one:

Leading National Organization Responds To Attacks On Community Organizing Statement from the Center for Community Change
Washington, dc- Recently, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and several commentators and surrogates surrounding the presidential contest have attacked and misrepresented community organizing.  The following is a statement from Deepak Bhargava, Executive Director of the Center for Community Change, a 40-year-old national organization that builds the field of community organizing with hundreds of local organizations nationwide:

“When Sarah Palin demeaned community organizing, she didn't attack another candidate.  She attacked an American tradition --- one that has helped everyday Americans engage with the political process and make a difference in their lives and the lives of their neighbors. 

"All across the country, in every state and every community, there are community organizers helping people find shared solutions to the shared problems they face.  The candidates for President and Vice President should be working to solve our shared problems, too, rather than attack others who are trying to do the same.

"From winning living wages to expanding affordable housing to improving the quality of public schools to getting health coverage for the poor and elderly, community organizers have made and will continue to make our communities and our country better for all of us.

"The values that community organizers and grassroots leaders represent are not Washington values or Wall Street values but American values--that we care for each other and look out for each other and know we're all interconnected and have a valuable role to play in making our country work for all of us.  Candidates should be courting these Community Values, not condemning them.”

Since 1968, the Center for Community Change has strengthened the leadership, voice and power of low-income communities nationwide to confront the vital issues of today and build the social movements of tomorrow.  The Center leads the Campaign for Community Values, a national movement of more than 300 grassroots, community-led organizations mobilizing voters in this election and beyond to demand policy changes that reflect our nation’s founding principles of shared responsibility, inclusion and interconnectedness. 
                  ###

Here's the second one:

America is Built on the Contributions of Community Organizers
Statement of Wade Henderson, President and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights

“The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights is a coalition of nearly 200 organizations, much of whose work is done through community organizers. These advocates have provided the leverage for Americans to organize themselves into unions, get the five-day work week, voting rights for every citizen, paid maternity leave and the curb cuts used by people with disabilities and young mothers with strollers.

We’re a nonpartisan coalition but we do take exception when anyone disparages the vast contributions of community organizers to American society.

The United States has had a long and proud history of contributions made by community organizers, from Benjamin Franklin who organized the first volunteer fire department in this country to Clara Barton, who organized assistance for soldiers during the Civil War, to Martin Luther King, Jr., who helped our great nation correct a historic wrong. Over the years, many more community organizers have brought changes to American society that benefit all of us.

Nothing is done in a vacuum.  Someone has to organize it to get it done.  That is the simple and great role of a community organizer.”

               # # #

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) is the nation’s oldest, largest, and most diverse civil and human rights coalition. For more information on LCCR and its nearly 200 member organizations, visit www.civilrights.org.

So, however you define "community," one can't say that these folks aren't organized.

Aw, I already DID a column on the tie thing

In what I can only characterize as a desperate attempt to get me to produce something for the actual newspaper, my colleague Cindi Scoppe has actually suggested that I turn my post about the leading candidates for the highest offices in the land not wearing ties into a column.

Really -- Cindi "Gravitas" Scoppe, who normally only has scorn for anything that doesn't bear on some topic as serious and gray as, say, state budget provisos.

So I gave it some thought, and I haven't completely dismissed the idea. But I will note that I've already written ONE column on the subject. Sure, it was in 1998, and I have the new angle on Obama and the rest, but just how often must this subject be addressed? Here, by the way, is that column from pre-blog days:

THE STATE
'CASUAL FRIDAY' IS ONE THING, BUT THIS WAS ON A MONDAY
Published on: 06/26/1998
Section: EDITORIAL
Edition: FINAL
Page: A10
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
Column: BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR

We had come to ask Hootie a favor. The Blowfish, too.

Jim Nichols, Cary Smith and I were at Fishco headquarters on Devine Street to meet with Rusty Harmon, Hootie's manager. Jim was then the executive director of Central South Carolina Habitat for Humanity. Cary was a past president of Habitat's board, and I was a board member.

We were there to ask Hootie to help us build a house. As it happened, they did, so the meeting was a success. But what sticks in my mind was something that happened before that point.

Rusty presented something of a paradox behind the desk, surrounded by books, papers, a PC and a laptop both running screen savers - all the usual trappings of the white-collar life. But he looked the way I did in college - hair running toward shoulder length, T-shirt and shorts.

But when he got up and walked by Cary on his way to fetch an associate, his flip-flops slapping against the floor, the contrast was dialed up several notches.

Cary was looking every bit the ex-IBM executive that he was, in a light gray suit. His leather shoes were polished, his hair trimmed close to the scalp, his shirt and tie everything that Big Blue would expect. He was sitting carefully, politely, quietly on the edge of a sofa, every inch of him projecting "trustworthy supplicant."

As soon as Rusty was out of earshot, Cary leaned slightly forward and said, very softly:

"So that's what success looks like."

His voice contained no irony or disapproval. It was filled with guileless, almost childlike wonder.

Spin forward three years, to last week. Cary is now president of United Way of the Midlands, and he has come to talk to the editorial board about recent changes in the way the community chest collects and distributes money. We meet in what I term "the fancy meetin' room." It's the newspaper's formal board room, with the long, polished table, the leather chairs, the paneling and the portraits of a century of past publishers keeping watch to make sure we don't do anything they wouldn't do.

The portraits kept their counsel, but I suspect they were taken aback by the picture Cary Smith presented, in open-necked, short-sleeved madras sport shirt and khaki pants. "You going 'cazh' today, Cary?" I asked, expecting him to say he was on his way to an outdoor event. But what he said was, "Oh, we've gone casual at United Way." He said it as matter-of-factly as you or I might say, "The dinosaurs are all gone."

Well, this was more than I was prepared to take in. Not that there's anything wrong with the way he was dressed. After all, this is the way South Carolina's bourgeoisie has long dressed for upscale barbecues, right down to his loafers without socks. No self-respecting Southern frat boy would ever let hosiery get between him and his Bass Weejuns.

But. But. But it wasn't even Friday. I was aware that lots of people in lots of offices were dressing down at the end of the week, but this was Monday.

I have to say, with no offense meant to my friend Cary, that I don't hold with it.

The point of clothing, in my own stuffy view, is to avoid distracting or giving offense, either through nakedness or an excess of individuality. I want people to interact with me and what I have to say, not my clothes. Give me blue and gray and white and khaki (but only with a blazer), and certainly give me blue or black socks - not because they look spiffy, but because they blend into the background.

I have enough things to think about in the morning without having to consider attire. Cary Smith has to remember now to wear a coat and tie on the days he meets with big donors.

Of course, I have little choice. I meet with all sorts of people in the course of a day who would think I wasn't giving them proper respect if I didn't wear the tie. They're in suits - or the bewildering array of outfits that women wear that supposedly equate to suits - and therefore so should the newspaper guy. It's a tradeoff: You go through life with a silk noose around your neck, but at least it makes things simple.

That's the way it's always been. Unfortunately, things are changing.

I still remember the first candidate who came in for an endorsement interview wearing shorts. It was in 1996. I assumed that since he was a Libertarian, he was just asserting his "right" to dress any way he pleased. We asserted our right not to endorse him, for reasons that extended beyond costume.

He was a harbinger. It's becoming less and less remarkable for folks to come in wearing jeans and even T-shirts. Sometimes they apologize. Others comment upon our ties as though we were the ones breaching decorum.

I still wear the coat and tie, and will until it just becomes so distracting to others that I can't do my job. That time may come sooner rather than later. I noticed at Rotary on Monday that more and more people were dressing like Cary, who happened to be seated at my table. I mentioned that to him, and he had this advice:

"Get used to it."