Brad Warthen's Blog

Stem cells and the Kulturkampf see-saw

Here's a place for those of you who are so inclined to comment on the Obama administration's new policy on stem cells. That is to say, the latest tilt in the Kulturkampf see-saw. Republicans get in charge, it tilts one way. Democrats get in charge, it tilts the other. And so it continues, even in the "post-partisan" era.

I don't know what to say about it myself because ... I don't know; I guess I haven't thought about it enough or something. The partisans seem REALLY sure of their sides, and personally, I don't know how they can be. But maybe it's something missing in me.

I suppose I was relatively comfortable with the Bush position because, near as I could tell, it was a compromise. But then, if I'm reading correctly, the Obama position is ALSO to some extent a compromise, because some restrictions will remain. And yet it is touted as a total reversal, which perhaps it is. I find it confusing.

It's not something we have a position on as an editorial board, because on these culture war things we are often genuinely conflicted. Many editorial boards are quick to sound off on these things because they are more ideologically homogeneous than we are. For us, it's not so simple, and we generally prefer to use up our political capital with each other struggling over the very difficult issues facing South Carolina, which are tough enough.

Anyway, if you read the editorials of most newspapers on the subject, you might think that there is no controversy at all, that the Obama position is of course the right and true one, and you need to be awfully backward to think otherwise -- nothing short of a triumph of science over the forces of darkness. Some examples:

• The New York Times: "We welcome President Obama’s decision to lift the Bush administration’s restrictions on federal financing for embryonic stem cell research. His move ends a long, bleak period in which the moral objections of religious conservatives were allowed to constrain the progress of a medically important science."
• The Boston Globe: "We applaud President Obama's executive order reversing the ban on federal stem-cell research, and the return of science unhobbled by political or religious considerations." (Actually, that quote is not from the editorial itself, but from the blurb summarizing it online.)
• The Philadelphia Inquirer: "Americans are understandably divided over President Obama's decision to lift restrictions on federal funding of human embryonic stem-cell research. But he took the course that promises the greater medical benefit. In reversing a funding ban imposed by President Bush, Obama yesterday also took a welcome step toward restoring the rightful place of scientific research in guiding public policy."
• St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "Federal funding is no guarantee that embryonic stem cell research will provide hoped-for cures to dreaded diseases like diabetes, let alone guarantee that any cures might come soon. But the executive order that Mr. Obama signed on Monday will clear away bureaucratic and procedural hurdles that have hampered that research. It provides an important new source of funding. Perhaps most important, it signals a new commitment to science ideals, free inquiry and open debate in American public policy."

The relatively "conservative" Chicago Tribune was more muted in its praise and even-handed in its presentation, but nevertheless expressed approval for the Obama move, saying the Bush policy had been too restrictive:

Sensible barriers to federal funding for cloning and the creation of embryos for research purposes remain in place. On Monday, Obama asked lawmakers to provide the support that will put the country at the forefront of vital stem cell research. It's now up to Congress to get behind the scientists. All Obama did was get out of their way.

And The Wall Street Journal? No editorial. But they did run an op-ed piece criticizing the new policy, headlined, "The President Politicizes Stem-Cell Research," with the subhead, "Taxpayers have a right to be left out of it."

That last point is one that one doesn't see emphasized enough, which is that this is not about whether research is allowed, but whether we the taxpayers will pay for it. And that's a legitimate conversation to have.

Another point that I would appreciate being updated on, and that seems to get ignored in the shouting matches, is the idea that the science has made the political argument moot, in terms of moving beyond the need for embryonic cells. That was the point made in this Krauthammer column a while back:

    A decade ago, Thomson was the first to isolate human embryonic stem cells. Last week, he (and Japan's Shinya Yamanaka) announced one of the great scientific breakthroughs since the discovery of DNA: an embryo-free way to produce genetically matched stem cells.
    Even a scientist who cares not a whit about the morality of embryo destruction will adopt this technique because it is so simple and powerful. The embryonic stem cell debate is over.

Was that wishful thinking on Krauthammer's part? Did that turn out to be a dead-end? Maybe some of you who follow the issue more closely than I do can point to something I should read to that effect.

Anyway, I'll be interested to see what Krauthammer says about it, if he addresses it. He has an interesting perspective for someone wearing the "conservative" stamp. First, to my knowledge he's not anti-abortion. Also, he is a physician by training, and he served on the Bush administration's Council on Bioethics, which HE maintains (and I'm sure some of you will disagree, although I just don't know) was...

... one of the most ideologically balanced bioethics commissions in the history of this country. It consisted of scientists, ethicists, theologians, philosophers, physicians -- and others (James Q. Wilson, Francis Fukuyama and me among them) of a secular bent not committed to one school or the other.

Anyway, that ought to be enough fodder to get y'all started, if you want to discuss this.

Brave new world of political discourse

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
ONCE, NOT so long ago, serious people decried the reduction and trivialization of political ideas to the level of a bumper sticker. Some days, I long for the coherence, the relevance, the completeness of bumper stickers.
    Let’s knit together a few of the unraveled threads that have frayed my mind in the past week, shall we?
    Thread One: A Colorado congressman who takes pride in his technological savvy claimed partial “credit” for the demise of a newspaper, saying, “Who killed the Rocky Mountain News? We’re all part of it, for better or worse, and I argue it’s mostly for the better.... The media is dead and long live the new media.”
    Thread Two: Last week, I started working out again. I can’t read when I’m on the elliptical trainer because I bounce up and down too much, so I turn on the television. This gives me an extended exposure to 24/7 TV “news” and its peculiar obsessions, which I normally avoid like a pox. I hear far more than I want to about Rush Limbaugh, who wants the country’s leadership to fail, just to prove an ideological point. The president’s chief of staff dubs this contemptible entertainer the leader of the president’s opposition. Even more absurdly, the actual chief of the opposition party spends breath denying it — and then apologizes for doing so. See why I avoid this stuff?
    Thread Three: Two of the most partisan Democrats in the S.C. Senate, John Land and Brad Hutto, introduce a mock resolution to apologize to Rush on behalf of South Carolina so that our state doesn’t “miss out on the fad that is sweeping the nation — to openly grovel before the out-spoken radio host.” The Republican majority spends little time dismissing the gag, but any time thus spent by anyone was time not spent figuring out how to keep essential state services going in this fiscal crisis.
    Thread Four: At midday Thursday I post on my blog a few thoughts about the just-announced candidacy of U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett for governor, and invite readers to share what they think of the Upstate Republican. As of mid-afternoon Friday, there were nine comments on the subject, and three of them were from me. By the same time, there were 66 comments about the Rush Limbaugh flap.
    Thread Five: A colleague brings to my attention a new Web site called SCTweets, where you can read spontaneous “Twitter” messages from such S.C. politicians as Anton Gunn, David Thomas, Bob Inglis, Nathan Ballentine and Thad Viers, with a number of S.C. bloggers thrown in. It’s the brainchild of S.C. Rep. Dan Hamilton and self-described GOP “political operative” Wesley Donehue (which would explain why Rep. Gunn is the only Democrat on the list I just cited). They see it as “a creative way to showcase SC’s tech-savvy elected officials.” It sounds like a neat idea, but when you go there and look at it... well, here’s a sample:

bobinglis Want a window into our campaign themes? Check out my recent letter at http://wurl.ws/9coX Join us if you can!

annephutto had a great lunch

AntonJGunn Having lunch with the Mayor of Elgin.

mattheusmei Prepare to have your mind blownaway http://tinyurl.com/b6w8w9 #sctweets, simply amazing!!!

RobGodfrey Beautiful day in Columbia. #sctweets

thadviers just had lunch with little Joe at Jimmy Johns.

    Perhaps this will be useful to someone, and I applaud Messrs. Hamilton and Donehue for the effort. But so far I haven’t figured out what Twitter adds to modern life that we didn’t already have with e-mail and blogs and text-messaging and, well, the 24/7 TV “news.” Remember how I complained in a recent column about how disorienting and unhelpful I find Facebook to be? Well, this was worse. I felt like I was trying to get nutrition from a bowl of Lucky Charms mixed with Cracker Jack topped with Pop Rocks, stirred with a Slim Jim.
    Thread Six: Being reminded of Facebook, I checked my home page, and found that a friend I worked with a quarter-century ago was exhorting me to:

* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions in a note to your wall.

    I followed his instructions. The book nearest to my laptop was the literally dog-eared (chewed by a dog that died three decades ago) paperback Byline: Ernest Hemingway. Here’s the fifth sentence on page 56:
“He smiled like a school girl, shrugged his shoulders and raised his hands to his face in a mock gesture of shame.”
    Not much without context, but you know what? I got more out of that than I got out of that Twitter page. At least I formed a clear, coherent picture of something.
    I just remembered that I said I would knit these threads together. OK, here goes:
    It occurs to me that Twitter and Facebook are the bright new world that the Colorado congressman who claims credit for killing The Rocky Mountain News extolled. In this world, political discourse consists of partisans prattling about talk show hosts and elected officials casting spontaneous sentence fragments into the dusty, arid public square.
    I was going to write a column for today about Congressman Barrett’s candidacy for governor. As I mentioned a couple of weeks back when I wrote about Sen. Vincent Sheheen entering the race, I’m trying to get an early start on writing as much as possible about that critical decision coming up in 2010, in the hope that if we think about it and talk about it enough, we the people can make a better decision than we have the past few elections.
    But I got distracted.
    I’ll get with Rep. Barrett soon; I promise. And I’ll try to write about it in complete sentences, for those of you who have not yet adjusted.

For links and more, please go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

This is worse than Facebook

You know how I've complained about how I just don't get Facebook -- that I find it disorienting, and just generally a lousy way to communicate information?

Well, I've found a worse way -- Twitter.

Have you seen this new site that S.C. Rep. Dan Hamilton and self-described GOP "political operative" Wesley Donehue have started, SCTweets? Basically, its point is:

...to find a creative way to showcase SC’s tech-savvy elected officials. Specifically, we expect the Statehouse crew to be twittering a lot from the floor and we thought it would be cool to see what they were saying. That goal somehow expanded and we decided to showcase all South Carolina politicos with our directory. We then gave them a way to interact through #sctweets.

Look, I don't mean to criticize Messrs. Hamilton and Donehue at all. I appreciate the effort. Go for it. But when I try to obtain any sort of information of value from a series of incomplete, typo-ridden sentence fragments from a bunch of people ranging from Anton Gunn to David Thomas to Bob Inglis to Nathan Ballentine to Thad Viers, with a lot of Blogosphere usual suspects such as Mattheus Mei thrown in, I feel like I've trying to get nutrition from a bowl of Lucky Charms mixed with Cracker Jack with cotton candy and Pop Rocks on top, stirred with a Slim Jim. Just a jumble of junk.

The "authors" aren't to blame. It's the medium. I'm still waiting to find any value in this Twitter thing. I suspect I'll be waiting a long time.

What do I consider to be GOOD way to communicate information? Well, here's a coincidence: I actually looked at my Facebook page this morning, and as usual got little out of it. But I noticed where a friend I worked with a quarter-century ago posted something that seemed a deliberate illustration of the incoherence of Facebook. He exhorted readers to:

* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions in a note to your wall.

So I followed his instructions (except for the posting part). The book nearest to my laptop was the literally dog-eared (chewed by a dog that died three decades ago) paperback Byline: Ernest Hemingway. Here's the fifth sentence on page 56 (if you count the incomplete, continued sentence at the top of the page as the first):

"He smiled like a school girl, shrugged his shoulders and raised his hands to his face in a mock gesture of shame."

And you know what? I got more out of that than I got out of that Twitter page. At least I formed a clear, coherent picture of something.

It occurs to me that Twitter is the bright new world that that Colorado congressman who claims credit for killing The Rocky Mountain News extols. And then it occurs to me that to the extent he is right, to the extent that this is the future of political communication, we are in a lot of trouble int his country...

Congressman says he whacked the Denver paper

Boy, and they say the MSM can be guilty of hubris...

Some congressman out in Colorado who is apparently overimpressed with himself because he travels the Information Superhighway (golly, how futuristic!), is quoted as saying:

Who killed the Rocky Mountain News? We're all part of it, for better or worse, and I argue it's mostly for the better...The media is dead and long live the new media."

Here's what's really ironic about this: After this was brought to my attention, I tried following various links to find any sort of authoritative, original source as to what he actually said, and within what context, and found myself bouncing around among a number of poorly designed, unattractive Web pages that didn't tell me much.

Romenesko pointed me to The Denver Post, which pointed me to an alleged "digital recording of the event" at something called coloradopulse.org, which may be the ugliest (and least helpful) Web page I've seen this year. So I struck out on my own, via Google, and found this Denver magazine site (I think), which pointed me to this item from something called "Denver Young Democrats Examiner," which read like someone's very run-of-the-mill blog post written "from the Netroots Nation speaker series at the DoubleTree Hotel in Westminster," which actually told me less than The Denver Post did.

The congressman's own Web site didn't enlighten me. Finally, I went back to Romenesko, which provided a link to where I could listen to the guy's comments, but when it told me it would take 9 minutes to download (it's still downloading as I speak), I lost interest. (By the way, I did run across an entire site devoted to the question, "Who killed the Rocky?" It's apparently done by one of the laid-off journalists, and displays far more Web savvy and accessibility than those other sites I was led to.)

Welcome to the brave new post-newspaper world, in which we all stagger around groping in the dark for information -- and then, when we find it, wondering whom to hold accountable for whether it's right or not. (The answer: Nobody, sucker.)

By the way, as a sort of postscript -- the Post says that on Monday, Rep. Polis was a little more "subdued" on the subject:

"It's not just 200 jobs that have been lost; it's also the silencing of a voice," he said. "The rise of new media and citizen journalism has hastened the demise of many newspapers, and we, unfortunately, all share in the blame.

ANOTHER social networking site? ARRGGGHHH!

Just got this press release:

Hi Brad,

I hope you are doing well. I wanted to let you know about a unique social news service that just launched - BUUUZ.com.

Have you ever wanted access to a community of people who have the same interests as you? Where you can share artistic visions, muses and styles? Many people find social websites like Facebook and MySpace invasive and difficult to navigate. At BUUUZ registration is simple and members create virtual "islands" based on subjects of interest (islands are populated with news from websites across the internet as well as BUUUZ community discussion). Creating an "island" for a topic is as easy as picking a few keywords that best describe your interests.

As an example, if you love to oil paint like I do, you can use favorite artists, museums, etc. as island keywords to be alerted on stories and member conversations mentioning them. Then you instantly become a part of a worldwide conversation through this new service, where you can find and interact with new friends who have the same interests.

In light of the Facebook Terms of Service uproar from last week I wanted to mention:

- BUUUZ's subscription revenue model, makes it so they do not have to "fight" with the users about owning their data.
- At BUUUZ, when a user deletes their account, and their data is completely deleted
- BUUUZ has also set up automatic deletion of old messages

Please feel free to take a look at the service at BUUUZ.com and reach out if you would like images or have questions.

Best Regards,
Brent

Brent Bucci
FortyThree PR

... to which I can only say, "ARRGGHHH!" Or, perhaps, "AIIIEEEE!!!" Or somewhat more sedately, "Please; not another freaking social networking site."

Since I did that column over the holidays about Facebook, I have had even MORE "friend requests," and some of them have been from being I actually felt obliged to say "yes" to, so as not to hurt anyone's feelings. (And yes, some of them were people I'd actually like to maintain connections with, but not all...) And some of them were ... a tad... weird. Like, if I thought myself a target for such things, I'd think "stalker." Which is not a good feeling.

Who's got time for all this socializing? Hey, you've got time on your hands, go read a newspaper. And then, go to the mall and buy something, and tell the merchant to buy some ads. Make yourself useful.

Stepping forward into the past: My cool new Moleskine notebook

As you may have gathered, I'm a bit of a gadget guy. One of the reasons I blog is for the opportunities it gives me to mess around with cameras and PDAs and laptops and the various ways you can use them to produce text, sound, video, etc. This very night, in fact, I'll be trekking out to the Verizon store to get a Blackberry to replace the Treo I use for work. That Blackberry will be, as my Treo is now, a place for working with e-mail, my calendar, my contacts, as well as providing another browsing platform and a backup camera. Oh, yeah, and a phone (although I use the current one least for that).

But at the moment I am most enchanted with a piece of low-tech, retro equipment that my youngest daughter was so thoughtful as to give me for Christmas, ignoring my hint for a new insulated coffee travel mug. She gave me a Moleskine notebook -- specifically, a Moleskine Reporter Ruled Notebook. You may have seen them in bookstores. They're advertised as the notebook of Hemingway and Picasso. In years past, I had thought of buying one (I was a great admirer of Hemingway in my youth, and he had something to do with my choice of career). But I couldn't justify the expense. After all, I get all the reporter's notebooks I need for free at work, right?

But I misunderestimated, to use a bit of Bushspeak, the magic of a really nice, classic, classy notebook in one's pocket. I just started carrying it yesterday, and it's already affecting how I work -- for the better, I think. Since the notebook itself is special, it makes me think a little more carefully about what I choose to jot down. And it also makes me WANT to come up with stuff that's worthy to write in it. It's a motivator in the way a blank screen on a laptop or a PDA is not. It's like, I don't know, working on a painting or something -- the sense that what I write here stays here, is permanent, has a life, and if this notebook is dug out of an old box in an attic by one of my great-grandchildren, they will read what I am writing today.

I find myself thinking I need to get a better pen to write in it with.

The book itself is esthetically appealing -- you can see why Hemingway might have wanted to carry one around the Montparnasse or to the bullring or the front or whatever. It's a perfect size for the hand and the suitcoat pocket. It's black. The paper is of high quality. It has that cool, built-in elastic band to secure it with, giving a feeling of completeness and accomplishment when you finish a note and get ready to put it back in your pocket. Using it is just an appealing tactile, visual and interactive experience all around.

And it's making me more efficient, of all things. Y'all know how I tend to start my day with breakfast downtown, where I pore over The State and The Wall Street Journal and whatever I else I have time to look at over my coffee. Well, I get a lot of ideas while doing that, but too often, by the time I get back to the office, and have my morning meeting, and then start dealing with the e-mail that has to be read and the copy that has to be moved and talking with Robert about a cartoon and so forth and so on, next thing you know it's past lunch and my ideas of the morning are long forgotten.

This morning, I had a column idea for Sunday of the classic ephemeral sort that would be likely to evaporate long before I had time to start on it -- bits and pieces from different stories I was reading in the paper. Wanting to hang onto the thread, I thought of sending myself some notes by e-mail on the Treo. But that is cumbersome at best, typing on that little thumb keyboard, and it lends itself only to the shortest of reminders. But then I remembered the notebook. So I sent myself an e-mail that simply said:

Hope springs, even in South Carolina politics

See Moleskin notebook

Then I opened my notebook and filled two pages with an outline for the column, an outline that would be just waiting for me to flesh out at my first opportunity (which, as it happens, did not arrive until mid-afternoon). Since I all too often don't write the first word of my Sunday column until midday Friday, this put me more than a day ahead on one of my must-do tasks of the week. Consequently, I might have a chance to write an extra column to run Tuesday (a page that has to be done this week because of the MLK holiday), one that occurred to me as I was doing the final editing on the Tuesday editorial (about the Obama inaugural).

A classic, simple black notebook. What an ingenious device for enhancing personal productivity. What will they think of next?

Please bear with me on these TypePad problems

This is just to let y'all know that I'm working hard to resolve these problems that some of y'all have identified on the blog (plus some I've discovered myself). I'm just not getting very far.

The problems result from recent changes TypePad has made to the blog platform. Among other things, they have arbitrarily decided that:

• There will be no more than 50 comments on a post, which explains why some of y'all had so much trouble back on this one. This, of course, is totally unacceptable, since that's the point at which some threads on this blog are just getting warmed up.
• A page, including archive pages, will not display more than 99 posts, even if I adjust my preferences to the highest setting. This leads to such absurdities as that fact that if you call up "January 2008" -- a month in which I'm guessing (and since I can't pull up the whole month, all I can do is guess) you only get the month from Jan. 31 back to about Jan. 22. The first three weeks of the month -- the height of blogging about the presidential primaries in S.C. -- are unavailable.

Anyway, just to show you I'm trying, here are my communication threads with TypePad from the last few days:

On Jan 5, 2009 5:54:36 PM, you (Brad) said:

Two problems have cropped up in the comments on my blog in recent days.

First, the names of the commenters are no longer showing up as e-mail or URL links.

Second, quite a few of my readers are complaining that their comments simply aren't showing up. As one of my regulars described the problem, "Same for me. I see the comments count increasing on the 'Wall St./Main Street' topic but don't see anything after your comment on 12/29."

I said I had no idea what was causing the problems, but I would report them...

On Jan 6, 2009 12:18:55 PM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad,

Thanks for the note. Can you provide us with a link to a post where these things are happening on comments? They may be related to current issues that we are working on, but it is helpful for us to see the problem in action.

Please let us know if we may be of further assistance.

Thanks,
Melanie

On Jan 6, 2009 12:31:59 PM, you (Brad) said:

Here's one:
http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/2008/12/when-wall-st-woes-hit-main-st.html#comments

Apparently, according to the counter (and this is supported anecdotally by my readers telling me their comments haven't posted), there have been 67 comments on that post. But only 25 show when I call it up.

On Jan 7, 2009 12:12:23 AM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad-

All the comments are not displaying due to the missing tags for comment pagination. With the new platform, the number of comments set to display on each page is limited to 50. You can change the number of comments set to display at Weblogs > Configure > Preferences.

Additionally, the templates for your blog will need to be updated with the new tags for pagination:
http://everything.typepad.com/blog/pagination.html

If necessary, we can update your templates with the new tags for you.

The commenter name will only display as a link in the footer if a website URL is entered in the comment form if you have the MTCommentAuthorLink tag set to not show the email address:
<$MTCommentAuthorLink show_email="0"$>

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Jen

On Jan 8, 2009 11:31:10 AM, you (Brad) said:

Jen, that would be absolutely wonderful if you could do that for me.

On Jan 8, 2009 11:46:11 AM, you (Brad) said:

One more thing. I went to Weblogs > Configure > Preferences, and found a 50-POST limit, but saw nothing where I could set the number of comments per post allowed.

FYI, I've had more than 300 comments on a post at times. It would be better to have no limit at all -- I don't want to frustrate my readers -- but if there has to be one, it should probably be 400 or 500. Certainly not 50.

On Jan 8, 2009 7:32:59 PM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad-

At Weblogs > Configure > Feedback, you can change the number of comments set to display on each page. Right now, we have a limit of 50 comments per page to improve page load times. We are looking into an option for increasing the number of comments allowed, but we don't have a timeline for when a higher number of comments per page will be implemented.

All the templates have been updated with the new tags for pagination. You can change the settings for the index pages at Weblogs > Configure > Preferences. More information: http://kb.typepad.com/id/72/

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Jen

On Jan 6, 2009 11:32:06 AM, you (Brad) said:

Long ago, when I first started my blog (May 2005), I found a good workaround for the fact that TypePad offers no convenient way to do HTML links or formatting in comments. I did it by composing it as a new post, switching to the HTML tab, then copying and pasting it with the coding into the comment box.

It's very important to me to be able to do this, as my comments frequently are about offering links in answer to readers' questions.

Anyway, one of several chronic problems I've found with this new TypePad platform is that this no longer works. For instance, I just tried to post this comment, with the second, third and fourth paragraphs indented to indicate that they were quoted material. The indents did not work when I copied the coded text into the comment. Here is the coded text:

<p>As for Karen's suggestion that it "Mighta also been good if someone had gone out and determined whether the place was 103,000," someone DID, allegedly. That's one of the many outrageous things about this story:</p>

<p style="margin-left: 40px;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; For a $350 fee, an appraiser hired by Integrity, Michael T. Asher,
valued the house at $132,000. Mr. Asher says although he didn't
personally believe the house was worth that much, he followed standard
procedures and found like-sized homes nearby that had sold in that
price range in 2006.<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "I can't appraise it for the future," Mr. Asher says. "I appraise it for that day."<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; T.J. Heagy, a real-estate agent later hired to sell the property,
says he can find only one comparable house that sold nearby in 2007,
for $63,000.</p><p>So much for <em>that</em> check on the system...</p><p></p>

And you can read the comment, as published, near the bottom of this post:
http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/2009/01/the-subprime-mess-in-microcosm.html#comments

On Jan 7, 2009 12:15:31 AM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad-

Only limited HTML is allowed in comments. It's likely you were using blockquote tags, instead of the indent tags, previously.

For instance to indent a quoted section of text, you would use blockquote tags similar to:

<blockquote>For a $350 fee, an appraiser hired by Integrity, Michael T. Asher, valued the house at $132,000. Mr. Asher says although he didn't personally believe the house was worth that much, he followed standard procedures and found like-sized homes nearby that had sold in that price range in 2006.<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "I can't appraise it for the future," Mr. Asher says. "I appraise it for that day."<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; T.J. Heagy, a real-estate agent later hired to sell the property, says he can find only one comparable house that sold nearby in 2007, for $63,000.</p><p>So much for <em>that</em> check on the system...</blockquote>

The p style tag is not supported in the comments field.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Jen

On Jan 8, 2009 11:29:53 AM, you (Brad) said:

So what you're saying is, I'm going to have to start entering my HTML coding MANUALLY, because my "compose" page won't code the thing right any more?

I've got to say that this new platform has way more drawbacks than it is worth. For three and a half years, I had this great workaround: I could compose a comment in reply to my readers on the compose form, get it to looking the way I want it on the Rich Text tab, with links and indents and bullets, then copy the version with the coding from the HTML tab over into my comment, and that worked fine.

Now you're saying that won't work any more? Do you have any idea how inconvenient this is?

On Jan 8, 2009 7:34:59 PM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad-

Thanks for your feedback. The blockquote tool has been removed from the new editor, but we are looking into adding it back in the future. In the meantime, the blockquote tags would need to be manually inserted into your comments.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Jen

On Jan 8, 2009 11:25:40 AM, you (Brad) said:

Well, this is weird. I was trying to find something I wrote on my blog last January, so I clicked on my "January 2008" link, and all I got was what I posted on January 31 and January 30.

WHERE are the other 29 days of posts?

On Jan 8, 2009 11:42:06 AM, you (Brad) said:

An addendum:

I think I found the problem, but it is not fixable at my end.

I went to weblogs/configure/preferences and found that archives were set to display no more than 10 posts at a time, which of course is ridiculous. I sometimes post 10 times in a day. In January 2008 -- the month of the S.C. presidential primaries -- I'm sure I posted more than 200 times, and probably closer to 300. I can't check now to see, because THE MAXIMUM SETTING ALLOWED IS 50 POSTS.

Which is also ridiculous. You know what 50 posts gives me? It gives me from Jan. 31 back to Jan. 22. So I call up the month, and 21 days of the month don't show.

This is unacceptable, as are many other recent changes to TypePad.

On Jan 8, 2009 7:38:16 PM, TypePad Customer Support said:

Hi Brad-

As mentioned previously, the blog had not been updated with the new tags for pagination. When I updated the Individual Archives Templates for comment pagination, I also updated the Main Index, DateBased, and Category archives with the new tags. At the end of the pages, you will now see a Next links to go to the next page of posts.

You can increase the number of posts set to display on each index page to 100 posts by updating the MTEntries tag in the Main Index, DateBased, and Category templates from:

<MTEntries>

to:

<MTEntries lastn="100">

Please note the maximum number of posts allowed on an index page is 100. If you enter lastn="999", only 100 posts will display.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Jen

On Jan 9, 2009 10:37:39 AM, you (Brad) said:

Jen,

I appreciate that you're trying hard to help me with this. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way of solving my problem without a policy change on TypePad's part.

And this really needs to change. It makes no sense to have, for instance, a link on my blog's main page to "January 2008," when the reader can only see a third or a fourth of the posts from that month when he or she calls it up. I can't even see it myself, which is particularly maddening, since the way I blog, I need to refer back to what I've written in the past A LOT.

So basically I need to know where to go to lobby for this policy change. A limit of 99 posts on an archive page, or a limit of 50 comments on a post, absolutely does not meet my needs, or my readers'.

So where do I go to express this?

Thanks again for your help thus far.

-- Brad Warthen

Some actual GOOD news about the U.S. auto industry

I'm not up to posting a lot of commentary on it, but I didn't want to let the day pass without noting this positive development, from an Energy Party point of view:

Fourteen U.S. technology companies are joining forces and seeking $1 billion in federal aid to build a plant to make advanced batteries for electric cars, in a bid to catch up to Asian rivals that are far ahead of the U.S.

The effort, the latest pitch from corporate America to inject federal dollars into a project, is similar to an alliance that two decades ago helped the U.S. computer-chip industry restore its competitiveness. Participants include 3M Corp. and Johnson Controls Inc.

Many experts believe battery technology and manufacturing capacity could become as strategically important as oil is today. Auto makers, including General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co., say they plan to roll out plug-in electric cars by 2010. But the U.S. has limited capacity to make the lithium-ion batteries those cars will need. Asian producers such as Panasonic Corp. dominate the car-battery field.

About time we got off our duffs on this. That could be a decent thing to spend federal dollars on, rather than more of the same...

Today's computer puzzler

Last week, the folks in our Information Services department came up with a new -- well, it's new to me -- laptop to replace the one that got stolen, the one I'd had ever since I started this blog. Which is great; they've even programmed it to do cool and mysterious things my old one never dreamt of.

But there's one problem -- whenever I'm typing, suddenly my typing cursor will jump, without warning, from where I'm TRYING to type to some other random part of the page, either in the middle of some previous sentence or out of the text box completely. This happens two or three times per sentence, and it's sufficiently maddening that, as you might have noticed, I didn't post at all yesterday.

The only "explanation" I could offer is that the typing always leapt in the direction of wherever the mouse pointer was at that moment.

The folks in information services figured it out today -- the problem is that the laptop has a touchpad, and I've never gotten used to the things, so I plug in a USB mouse. The problem is that the heel of my hand, or ball of my thumb, or whatever you call the parts of the hand near the wrist, keep brushing against the touchpad. Every time that happens, it's the equivalent of a mouse click, so the typing cursor jumps to where the mouse pointer is, if you can follow that.

So all I had to do was go to the control panel, and deactivate the touchpad. Simple. Obvious. I should have thought of it.

Only one problem: There's nothing in the control panel about the touchpad. And nothing down in the right-hand corner of the taskbar, either (I'm running Windows XP). As far as this computer is concerned, it doesn't HAVE a touchpad. Except that it does.

I'm sure the folks in IS will figure this out on Monday. In the meantime, I've got a piece of cardboard over the touchpad, and that's working. But I was wondering -- between now and then, does anybody out there have any suggestions for turning the blasted device off?

Make that TWO pings, Vasily...

You probably saw that the Supreme Court sided with the U.S. Navy against the whales off Southern California. While I don't have all that much to say about it, I thought it would be of interest to some of y'all to discuss the ruling here.

Whales are great, but I thought what Chief Justice John Roberts wrote made sense:

“The lower courts failed properly to defer to senior Navy officers’ specific, predictive judgments,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., joined by four other justices, wrote for the court in the first decision of the term.

For the environmental groups that sought to limit the exercises, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “the most serious possible injury would be harm to an unknown number of marine mammals that they study and observe.” By contrast, he continued, “forcing the Navy to deploy an inadequately trained antisubmarine force jeopardizes the safety of the fleet.”

Contrasting with that snappy salute to the brass, Justices Ginsburg and Souter luridly dissented:

“Sonar is linked to mass strandings of marine mammals, hemorrhaging around the brain and ears” and acute effects on the central nervous system as well as “lesions in vital organs,” Justice Ginsburg wrote.

And though the Navy has said it can find no previous documented case of sonar-related injury to a marine mammal in such exercises, Justice Ginsburg said the service had predicted that a current set of exercises off the California coast would cause lasting injuries to hundreds of beaked whales, along with vast behavioral disturbances to whales, dolphins and sea lions.

The majority was overturning a ruling by the -- you guessed it -- Ninth Circuit.

And yes, that headline is a reference to Tom Clancy, who, were he an appeals judge, would be more of the Fourth Circuit variety.