More Snow Than Needs to Be

Yes, by now everyone knows about the two feet of snow that fell overnight Friday and into Saturday in the Pittsburgh region. Here at OMT, we were out around 7:30 on Saturday morning starting the dig-out while it was still snowing, and we didn’t come back in until around noon. Even then, we only managed to dig out the front, along with clearing the walks for a couple of our elderly neighbors and then digging our our car, which we had parked in the front rather than in the garage. We’d learned years ago that heavy snows make our alley impassable and so now we park on the front street when a storm is headed for us because at least Raymond Street might get plowed by the city.

Our back yard - Before

With our neighborhood of Swisshelm Park being as close to the border between Pittsburgh and Swissvale as it is, the difference in snow removal between the two municipalities is both unmistakable and dramatic. Swissvale had trucks out Friday night, and by Saturday afternoon they’d hit most streets and had started working on the alleys.

Our back yard - After

Here in Pittsburgh, the only trucks that came through were guys who’d strapped plows onto their pickups, clearing a way so that at least Raymond Street had a pathway, forget about the alley. When we had a storm a couple of weeks ago, Raymond Street never was plowed, and had it not been for a relatively quick warm-up, the street would have remained a mess until Friday’s storm moved in.

As we sit down to do our taxes in the coming weeks, we city residents would do well to remember that our 3% tax rate doesn’t even buy us plowed streets in the wintertime, while Swissvale residents’ 1% somehow manages to pull off both this and resurfacing in the summertime, which is another thing for which our neighborhood is usually at the end of the line. Swisshelm Park may be an isolated enclave of Pittsburgh surrounded by Frick Park, but that doesn’t mean that our tax dollars should have any less purchasing power than any other neighborhood. If we were to rise up and threaten to secede from Pittsburgh and join up with Swissvale, we’d probably finally get some attention from our boy mayor, who, by the way, was off at Seven Springs celebrating his 30th birthday this weekend while we were back here waiting in vain for his snow plows to come and clear out our streets.

We hope the little shit had a good time.

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Anyone who reads OMT regularly knows that we take a generally dim view of electronic media, from the TV networks, to cable, to NPR, to the blogosphere. And all of those outlets managed to indict themselves with their coverage of the eastern snowstorm. From those who insisted on calling it a “nor’easter” even though the storm came from the south (apparently, they were under the impression that the name reflects where the storm strikes rather than its origin), to the idiots who seized upon the terms “snowmageddon” and “snowpocalypse” and then repeated them ad nauseum, this weekend’s coverage was a monument to the unqualified stupidity that has completely overtaken a once-proud profession.

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God help the poor bastard who parks in our spot when we go to work today.

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By the way, OMT was featured on the Sunday Post-Gazette Editorial page again.

Party of Lincoln

We’re getting ready to batten down the hatches for the snowstorm that we’re supposed to be getting this weekend, so all we have for you today is this toon by Mr. Fish.

We’ve had a busy week, which is why we’ve been uncharacteristically silent the past few days. But after all of the ruckus last week, we we actually welcomed the break.

Maybe when we’re snowed in this weekend, we’ll write something.

It’s All Downhill From Here

Today is Groundhog Day, the winter cross-quarter day that marks the half-way point between winter and spring. After today, we’ll be closer to the first day of spring than the first day of winter, and here at OMT, we can only say “thank God”.

We find that as we get older, we can tolerate Pittsburgh winters less and less. And even though we have no real love for Florida, what with its penchant for Republican politics and all, we must admit that the southern part of The Sunshine State has certain climatological features which we find to be quite compelling. The thought of cashing in our chips and heading south is one that we find ourselves turning over in our head more and more of late. Sure, there are hurricanes and cockroaches the size of finches, but only rarely is there snow and ice. And what we like to call “jacket weather” is about as chilly as one can expect in Miami and vicinity. Year-round biking is the rule, and we’re talking about biking without ski clothing, which for us is something very difficult to resist. To say nothing of being able to savor tomatoes and other delights fresh from our own garden right about now.

But that’s another column for another day.

The idea behind Ground Hog Day, that should Punxsutawney Phil and his bretheren see their shadows we can expect six more weeks of winter, is actually grounded in sound meteorological principles. If around midwinter we have a stretch of clear weather, this means that there is a strong upper-level high pressure system firmly in place, pumping cold, arctic air over our region, and it is likely to persist until the warmer weather of spring finally breaks it up. If, however, it’s overcast, rainy or even snowy around midwinter, it’s an indication that the weather is more variable, and much more likely to lean toward the warmer and wetter. We’re painting in broad strokes here, and, like anything else, it’s not a perfect formula, but you get the idea.

Even long before the advanced weather technology of the 20th century, with its satellites, Doppler radar, and mesomorph meteorologist Jim Cantore, humans have made note of this business of bright weather around midwinter’s day and the potential for continued winter weather. The Catholic Church used to celebrate the feast of Candlemas on February 2, in which all the candles to be used in the church in the coming year would be blessed. Even then there was a saying, “If Candlemas be bright and clear, there’ll be two winters in the year“, which to us sounds a lot classier than making a fuss about an ill-tempered rodent crawling out of the ground and seeing his shadow, but the death of class in American society is, again, another column for another day.

Here at OMT, we’re just glad that this hideous season has finally been handed its walking papers. And while it’s probably going to take its good old time in getting up off its ass and getting the hell out of here, we can take some comfort in knowing that the inevitability of spring will very soon beat it into submission, whether it wants to leave or not.

We noticed on Saturday that in our neighbor George’s flower beds there were small, deep green crocus shoots pushing apart the frozen ground and reaching up to a decidedly wan sun. We can all take a lesson from their optimism and determination.

Fed Up With Independents

Today’s Sunday Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has two essays in which “independents” sound off about the two main American political parties. In Fed Up With the Democrats, J. David Bell takes on the party of Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, while in Fed Up With the Republicans, Douglas Mackinnon blasts the party of Rush Limbaugh and the Ku Klux Klan.

While we admit that for our sensibilities, Mackinnon’s piece (in which he uses the example of South Carolina Republican Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer’s recent observation in which he likens people on welfare to rats who breed more prolifically when they have a grain silo at their disposal as the jumping-off point for his thesis that Republicans are nothing but a bunch of unprincipled louts who care more about getting and keeping power than they do about exercising it for the good of the people when they have it) is much more to our liking, as would be any essay that slams the Republican Party for any of its unending litany of crimes against a free and diverse America, we find ourselves shaking a disapproving finger at both Mackinnon and Bell, in spite of some of the very good points they make about their respective targets.

“I’m an independent, but like many progressives I voted for the Democrats — including Barack Obama — in the 2008 election”, Bell begins in his broadside against the Democrats, “because I hoped they’d keep their promises concerning the issues that matter to me most: global warming, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the policies of torture and detention pursued by the previous administration, the lack of universal health care, the profligacy and criminality of the financial industry, the corruption of Washington politics, the devastating effects of the recession.”

He lists everything that he sees as Democratic failures since the 2008 election, observing along the way that “a party so ideologically, morally and politically bankrupt has no business existing“, before ultimately salivating, “I don’t know what new party will rise from the ruins of the Democrats. All I know is it can’t rise too soon“.

Way to bring down a room, Bell. How about we give you the number of this nice girl we know; sounds like you’re in the middle of a real dry spell there.

Over on the other side of the street, Mackinnon, after quoting Lt. Governor Bauer’s remarks about welfare recipients, says that he “gets it” that “many Republican elected officials tend to put self-preservation or the interests of their party well before the needs of the people or their nation“, referring to this as “the increasingly heavy burden we all carry which is grinding our future into a fine powder“. He goes on to say, “an honorable way for any politician to stop or at least slow that suicidal progression is to challenge and rebuke those in his or her own party who gleefully turn the grind stone and shame themselves“.

Which gives us a nice segue into our remarks.

How does one “stop or at least slow” what is happening to either political party when, instead of staying and fighting for what they think is right so that they might actually shift the trajectory of the party into a direction more in line with their beliefs, they run away in a fit of pique? It’s easy to shout from the cheap seats that the two-party system is a total disaster, and that what is needed is a third party to give those Democrats and Republicans their comeuppance. From our perspective, we think that adding a third party to the current situation would only take something that is already an unqualified mess and pump liquefied bovine excrement all over it with a high-pressure fire hose.

Democracy was never supposed to be easy. Jefferson, Adams and Madison were not the kind of guys who sat back and hoped things would work out while leaving the actual labor of building and maintaining a nation of government-by-the-people to others. How is the Democratic Party supposed to change when people like Bell scramble for the exits as soon as the dust settles from an election? Or when rank-and-file Democrats lose heart in the face of monolithic Republican opposition or with every nonsensical pronouncement from Fox (ahem) News?

How does one expect the Republican Party to be brought back from the suburbs of fascism when people like Mackinnon don’t stay to fight the good fight, and instead abandon the party to the microcephalic ideologues who have taken the reigns of power?

As long as good people are unwilling to do the good work that is by definition necessary to keep and protect our freedoms, then they shouldn’t expect anything to change for the better. As long as those who could make a difference in the Democratic and Republican parties abdicate their responsibilities to make those differences, then all the bitching and moaning we hear from these “independents” is just a lot of hooey (we’d have said “bullshit”, but we’re pretty sure we’ve reached our profanity quota for the week).

The Democratic and Republican parties are not going to go away any time soon. And a new party is not very likely, given that everyone left over are people like Bell and Mackinnon, who it seems, wouldn’t be satisfied with anyone for more than one election cycle, let alone have the resolve to stick around for the arduous work that building a new party from scratch would require.

Only in the movies are the evil and corrupted power brokers overthrown by the young, idealistic pure-of-heart hero. In the real world, in order to get anything meaningful done, we have to roll up our sleeves and fight battles less glamorous and spectacular than in the movies, but no less effective. It takes the commitment from people who are actually interested in participating in real change down on the court, not jeering at the players from the stands.

In short, grow up. Here at OMT, we knew that President Obama and the Democrats weren’t going to be able to just snap their fingers and within six months the entire carnage wrought by eight years of the Bush administration would be reversed and we’d be well on our way by this time to Great Society II. We live in a complicated world, and it doesn’t help that everything that made America great in the first eight decades of the 20th century was squandered and trashed in the last two. There are no easy solutions. And you can’t get upset and run home every time the ref makes some call that goes against you.

You’ve got to shrug it off and stay in the game. Otherwise, we all lose.

Instead, independents give us talk about some new party “rising from the ruins”, which would happen, we presume, while the Bells and Mackinnons of this world sit comfortably on the sidelines. Who, instead of stepping up, remaining engaged, and trying to change the system from within, throw a temper-tantrum when things don’t go exactly their way.

Which leaves them veering from one hopeless outsider whack-job to another, from Ron Paul, to Ralph Nader, to Ross Perot, to John Anderson; who tilt at their windmills without a hope in hell of actually making a real difference, and in the process give their equally quixotic followers a chance to throw away their votes on “principle”.

Well, your “principled” votes for Ralph Nader in 2000 gave us eight years of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

How’d that work out for you guys?

The Moron Majority, Redux

We were surprised yesterday when, about 15 minutes after we posted The Moron Majority, we noticed a tsunami of hits to our site, and a number of angry, over-the-top entries in our comments queue. Most of these were from disgruntled North Carolinians who took issue with our portrayal of them as “backwoods racists and ‘new south’ carpet-bagger immigrants”, although some of them complained about our attacking Public Policy Polling, the “fly-by-night” polling outfit that was the launchpad for our ire in the piece.

We didn’t approve any of these comments because, as we said, some of them were over the top, but one of them was from Ruby Sinreich, editor of OrangePolitics, a blog featuring “progressive perspectives on Orange County, NC”, in which the white, upper middle class of Chapel Hill and its environs wax progressively about such topics as greenways, driving with cell phones, shopping center developments, bond issues for library expansion, and similar issues so important in helping to break the cycle of poverty of their black neighbors in the counties to the east of Orange, and along the coast, some of which have poverty rates over 30%. Of course, considering that “progressive politics in North Carolina” must be something very much like conservative politics in San Francisco, we sympathize with Ms. Sinreich and her friends for the uphill battle they must be facing constantly, and on a daily basis, bringing the good news of liberal politics to a decidedly unreceptive constituency. Although, quite frankly, as we peruse her site, we don’t see a whole lot of heavy lifting going on with respect to issues like poverty, jobs, education, and crime in the poorer counties in other areas of North Carolina. But who has time for such issues when there’s a threat to put a Walgreen’s on Estes Drive South?

“Wow“, Ms. Sinreich told OMT. “Try a little research before you rant next time. Did you even lift a finger to Google them? PPP is a respected, nationwide, Democratic polling agency. They have been known for having some of the most accurate figures leading up to high-profile races like the Massachusetts senate race and the 2008 Presidential election“.

This sentiment was echoed by another reader, “NCer” (which we presume to mean “North Carolina-er”), who said, “Wow, you really have no grasp of statistics do you? You know nothing about statistical sampling and margin of errors of polling but yet feel yourself superior enough to lecture others on it. Who’s the Moron now?”

That, “NCer”, would be you. And what is “wow“, anyway? Some North Carolinian quirk of dialect that is required before you people are able to speak?

Well, of course we did our research. We’ve known about them for some time now, and this wasn’t the first time we’ve slammed them. But, apart from the fact that we hold “Democratic” polling agencies in as much contempt as we hold “Republican” ones (we are of the naive opinion that polling agencies should check their partisan considerations at the door in order to be at least worth their weight in shit), we wonder about what kind of person, exactly, holds respect for a polling agency that would try to pass judgment on the pulse of a nation of 320 million people from a sample of 1,151 people? Sure, maybe they had “some of the most accurate figures leading up to high-profile races like the Massachusetts senate race and the 2008 Presidential election” (who’s not doing their research now, Ruby?), but is that supposed to give them a free pass for the Fox (ahem) News survey?

And for your information, NCer, it doesn’t take an advanced degree in probability and statistics to understand that the PPP survey’s small sample renders their conclusions meaningless. As we indicated yesterday, a polling sample of 68 ten-thousandths of a percent of the group being represented is invalid on its face. And, goddamit, we don’t just feel superior enough to lecture others about it, we are superior enough to lecture others about it.

We’re sorry, but we feel that any polling organization that tries to pass off the results of such a shabbily performed survey as being even remotely indicative of anything more than the opinions of an isolated subgroup is not doing their homework. It’s like saying that a scoop of sand from the Atacama desert is representative of the soil of the entire planet. And we feel that any polling outfit that operates with such reckless disregard for the truth (which is what any good polling operation seeks above all else, right?) deserves to be slammed as a two-bit “fly-by-night polling outfit”, as we so viciously labeled them in our piece yesterday.

Ms. Sinreich kept obsessively checking back to see whether we had approved her comment until, apparently unable to stand it any longer, she contacted us to find out why we hadn’t approved it, as if we had some unspoken “blogger’s obligation” to do so. As we’ve said in these pages before, we take a dim view of this whole business of reader comments that everyone seems to expect as being just part of the territory with blogs. What ever happened to reading what someone has written and then thinking about it, rather than having to chime in with your two cents. Everybody’s gotten used to this notion that their opinion matters these days, and that everyone else should be interested in what they have to say. Well, here at OMT, it’s only our opinion that matters, and if you disagree with us, we say, “shut the fuck up”. We’ve never been much for following rules, and if one of the rules of blogging is that you have to publish every idiotic comment that comes down the pike from people taking issue with what you’ve said, we eschew that particular rule with special relish.

In a final flourish as she walks out the door, Ruby says, “You only make yourself look ignorant with slurs like “North Carolina’s indigenous backwoods racists and their ‘new south’ carpet-bagger immigrant neighbors.”"

Well, you have us there, Ruby. We admit to being pretty rough yesterday on North Carolinians (or “North Carolina-ers”, as is the apparent regional usage), and sometimes when we make sweeping pronouncements like that, good people get swept up with it. We’re sure that there are a lot of fine people in North Carolina, people with good in their hearts, hard-working people with love for their fellow man, and who are as fine a citizen as one might find anywhere in this great country of ours. And to those people of North Carolina who were offended by some of the hurtful things that we said in our piece yesterday, we are truly sorry.

But slurs, ugly as they may sometimes be, do not spontaneously generate out of thin air. Like it or not, they have a basis in truth. And, while the focus of our remarks yesterday was on North Carolina, that state is not alone in having people who harbor the kinds of feelings we were “slurring” yesterday. In many ways, Pennsylvania is no better. In these very pages, we’ve talked about Pennsylvania in those terms. The problem, as we see it, is that it isn’t just North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Texas, or any individual state that is the problem. Racism is a national problem in America, simmering just under the surface, bubbling up from time to time as we have seen portrayed in myriad ways in the past year or so, reminding us that for all the progress that has been made in this country since Martin Luther King’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial, we as a country and as a society have a long way to go before King’s dream becomes real. And we don’t do ourselves any favors by convincing ourselves that that’s not so.

We just hate it so much that sometimes we lose perspective, and good people get hurt, as happened yesterday. We’re genuinely sorry for the hurtful language we used at the expense of the people of North Carolina.

Now, Texas is another matter entirely.

The Moron Majority

A new poll out this week from Public Policy Polling, one of the dozens of fly-by-night polling outfits that have sprung up to service the insatiable information appetites of the “new media”, reveals that Fox (ahem) News is the “most trusted news operation” in the US.

Fox, that propaganda organ of modern-day John Birchers, whose “fair and balanced” slogan carries along with it an irony not seen in journalism circles since the days of the Soviet Union’s Pravda, which is Russian for “truth”. We, as Jack Paar used to say, kid you not.

Setting aside for a moment that saying that Fox is the “most trusted” news organization in America is akin to saying that Bernie Madoff is the most trusted financial adviser in the country, the sheer affront to the sensibilities of all thinking people that such a suggestion represents, and what it means in terms of hope for the future of America as it tries to navigate its way through the turbulent waters of a rapidly-changing world in which we are increasingly unable to impose our will upon the rest of the planet is as frightening as it is appalling.

Until you take a closer look.

What Public Policy Polling (PPP), an outfit based in North Carolina with visions of Gallup and Zogby dancing in their heads, has found was that almost half (49%) of those surveyed said that Fox (ahem) News was the “most trusted”, with 39% for CNN, 35% for NBC, 32% for CBS, and ABC apparently the “least trusted” at 31%.

Natrually, PPP doesn’t stress the size of its polling sample; which turns out to be 1,151 registered voters.

We understand this fully. If it were us, neither would we.

In the 2008 national elections, the last election for which there are reliable statistics, there were a total of 169 million registered voters nationwide. PPP surveyed what amounts to approximately 68 ten thousandths of a percent of the registered voters in the country, a number about as statistically significant as the number of planets in the Milky Way galaxy in which civilized wombats have harnessed the power of the lever. It’s also likely that PPP didn’t go too far outside of their home base of North Carolina, a state notable for producing such luminaries as Jesse Helms, John Edwards, and Gomer Pyle. Not to mention a cash crop that causes over 400,000 deaths a year in the United States alone.

North Carolina – what we here at OMT like to call “the thinking man’s South Carolina”.

Well, of course North Carolina’s indigenous backwoods racists and their “new south” carpet-bagger immigrant neighbors would gravitate to Fox in such impressive numbers. Hell, most of the people on Fox (ahem) News are backwoods racists and “new south” carpet-bagger immigrants.

Well, except for Sarah Palin. She’s something else altogether.

Actually, we don’t have any direct evidence that PPP’s sample only included their friends and neighbors, but how else does one explain their bizarre conclusions? And even if they had bothered to spread that sample over all 50 states, they would only have contacted 23.02 people in each state. How can you draw a conclusion on such an issue like the “most trusted” news organization in America with a sample that small? We’ll bet that we could go out and find a majority of 1,151 people who would say that Rhode Island is bigger than Texas, and we’d even spot you by allowing half of the sample to be from Texas.

In fact, the more Texans the better. We’ll go so far as to say that we could round up 1,151 Texans who wouldn’t be able to tell you where Dallas is. The only surprise from that poll would be how many from the survey sample were from Ft. Worth.

But we’re veering off the crushed limestone now and into the weeds, and we didn’t set out today to bash Texans, as addicted to the practice as we are, and as much joy as it brings us.

Apart from Fox, the other news organizations listed in the PPP poll (sounds like something Porky Pig might say) downplayed the poll and its conclusions, if they mentioned it at all. But the tablogosphere (The Huffington Post, Politico, The Daily Beast, and their ilk) seized upon it and ran, as is their wont, screaming with it, shouting it from the rooftops as though it was something of earth shattering importance, like a heretofore unknown lover of Tiger Woods, the possibility of a fissure in The Brangelina, or some new revelation from Game Change, a book that answers the musical question, “what would you get if you took one of Teddy White’s books and passed it through the digestive tract of a yak?”.

Of course, the political tabloid/blogs depend on outfits like PPP to supply them with journalistic fodder, no matter how dubious its veracity, so that they can preen themselves as the next generation replacement for traditional news organizations like The New York Times, and our own Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which is very much like promoting vanilla Jello Pudding as a replacement for a flan.

Try as we might, we can find little discernible difference between what we do here at OMT and what the tabloggers do, except that there is obviously money in it for them, and God knows that’s not the case for us. But at least OMT can stand with our corporate head high, proud that at least our tongue is firmly planted in our cheek when we portray ourselves as going eyeball-to-eyeball with the high rollers in the news game, like our “news partners over at the BBC“.

Here at OMT, we’re nothing if not ironic. Not to mention holier-than-thou.

But we’ll take ironic over moronic any day of the week.

Not to mention holier-than-thou.

Who wouldn’t?

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Days

We’ve recently become aware of the plight of Uzbek photojournalist Umida Akhmedova, who is currently under arrest in Uzbekistan, and is awaiting trial for “defamation and insulting Uzbek traditions”. Ms. Akhmedova got on the wrong side of the Uzbek authorities with her 2007 book Men and Women from Dawn to Dusk, which contains about 100 photographs of the lives and customs of the people of rural Uzbekistan. A special commission assembled by a government prosecutor has concluded that the photographs make Uzbekistan look “backward and uncultured”. If Ms. Akhmedova is convicted, she faces a potential sentence of 6 months in prison, or three years of forced labor.

Our news partners over at the BBC have prepared a slide show of some of the photographs from the collection.

Here at OMT, we think we know “backward and uncultured” when we see it (any TV broadcast of an awards ceremony will do nicely), and we’re hard pressed to find anything like that in these photographs. To us, they seem to portray a proud people with distinct customs and traditions that should be celebrated, not shunned. As those of us in the west plunge headlong into a homogenized modernity of questionable aesthetic value, we need to be reminded of the wide variety of human cultural expression so vividly illustrated in photographs like those of Ms. Akhmedova.

We also need to be on guard against self-loathing government officials who look at their own traditions with such scorn and derision that they take the extraordinary step of prosecuting a documentarian whose sole interest is in preserving for all the unique and rich cultural heritage of her people, for whom she carries in her heart a love and pride to which the simple-minded bureaucrats in Tashkent can only aspire. Embarrassment of an ethnic group’s cultural heritage by the government is the low rung on the ladder that ultimately leads to genocide, and it needs to be nipped in the bud.

We urge President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to reach out to the Uzbek government and ask them to put a stop to this “backward and uncultured” prosecution of Umida Akhmedova, so that she can continue her good works.

Journalist as Human Being

Here at OMT, one of the things that infuriates us about TV’s coverage of natural disasters is that oftentimes cameramen and reporters are so quick to cling to the flimsy life-preserver of “journalistic detachment” when they are in the midst of terrible human suffering that they are oblivious to the tragedy being played out before their eyes. We caught a clip last week of an elderly Hatian woman lying on the ground, suffering, obviously in pain, reaching out to the camera and saying, “help me .. please get me some water …”, begging for help, while the cameraman tightened the focus on her and zoomed in for a horrific close-up before eventually panning away to some other, apparently “more interesting” example of suffering. You could hear the plaintive wails of the hapless woman fading as the cameraman moved away from her.

Had we been there, after we’d found the poor woman some water, we would have gone up to that heartless bastard, taken the camera out of his hands, and beaten him senseless with it. There is journalistic detachment and then there is humanity, and the ability to discern the difference is not something that should need to be taught in journalism school.

Which brings us to Anderson Cooper.

Here at OMT, we’ve always piled the criticism high on AC, deriding him as a pretty-boy with weak journalistic credentials; a rich boy (he’s the son of Gloria Vanderbilt, and an heir to the Vanderbilt fortune) who has had his life handed to him on a silver platter roughly since birth.

At times, we’ve been unfair to him, which shows that even we know when we’ve gone too far. But in the main, we felt our contempt for him was justified. Having lived the life he’s lived, we felt, surely beneath that pretty, airline-pilot face and toned, gym-rat body, there was little of substance, and a good deal that was loathe-worthy.

And then he goes and does what he did in Haiti the other day.

Amidst a violent gang of looters in Haiti, a young boy was hit in the head with a rock. Coop rushes into the fray, pulls out the profusely bleeding kid, and drags him off to safety, leaving an expensive CNN camera unguarded while he helps the kid.

This video documents the incident.

Here at OMT, we were impressed, and very moved, by Cooper’s bravery and compassion in this incident. For all the comfort that he’s had in his life, it looks like Gloria raised him right after all. There are a lot of American journalists who could take a lesson from what AC did when things got dicey. Not only would they be better human beings if they followed his example, we would argue that they would be better journalists, too.

As for Coop, we admit that we’d badly misjudged him, and for that we apologize. And while we’re not going to rush out and give him an OMT Buddy-Boy Award, we are going to let up on him, and let him do his job without casting aspersions on him and his work.

His wealth and privilege are of great disadvantage to him in his chosen profession, after all, with everyone (like us) using it as a cane to whip him at even the slightest provocation.

(OK, that’s the last crack, we promise …)

Anyway, we give an OMT salute to Anderson Cooper for doing the right thing when the chips were down, and for proving us wrong in the process (which makes this the second post in a row in which we admit error).

You’ve earned a break, Coop, and we’re gonna give it to you …

Wishful Thinking, Redux

So we were wrong. So sue us.

The voters of Massachusetts didn’t do what we thought they were going to do yesterday, and they sent Republican Scott Brown to Washington in Ted Kennedy’s old seat.

All this means is that we were right about the other stuff; how the media is manipulating the political landscape so that neither party, Democrat or Republican, will be able to govern this country for very much longer. One year after President Obama took office with a mandate for change, the media has managed to poison the electorate to the extent that they have been convinced that either change has been moving too slowly, or that the changes that have been made (as if) are in the wrong direction. One short year after Obama was handed the worst mess that any incoming President has faced, due to the incomprehensible recklessness, incompetence, and arrogance of the previous administration, with which, you may recall, the voters were so pissed off that they gave the Democrats a sweeping victory.

So now, we are apparently doomed veer back and forth from one extreme to the other, driven by a media whose intrusion into the government has reached intolerable levels. America is in peril, and the media will one day have much to answer for.

But it isn’t entirely their fault. The media is enabled by an electorate that is too lazy to be informed, too proud that they are uninformed, too stupid to understand the complexity of the world in which we live, and so spoiled and demanding that they expect instant solutions to the problems that they are too lazy, uninformed, and stupid to comprehend, and throw temper tantrums when their demands are not met right now.

It is this generation, born after 1960, those who are just coming into power now, who have never known sacrifice, don’t understand duty, have had their every need met from the time they blinked into consciousness, and who as a result lack empathy, compassion, or any other human quality beyond their own needs, who will deliver this nation to its ignominious end, and usher in a new dark age of technology-driven authoritarianism, in which the concept of human rights, privacy, civil liberties, and government by the people will be quaint but discredited concepts of an earlier age, a bygone time in which society experimented with enlightened liberalism, only to find, as in Rome, that when a society becomes too rich, too bloated, too comfortable, and too paranoid that they might lose it to someone else to remember that everyone’s in this together, that society becomes an illusion, a dream. And like any dream, it drifts away into nothingness soon after we are jolted awake.

But we digress …

Wishful Thinking

Voters in Massachusetts go to the polls today to elect a senator to fill the seat of the late Edward Kennedy, in a race that is being described as a “bellwether”, and a “referendum on the Obama administration”. Up until a couple of weeks ago, Democrat Martha Coakley seemed like a shoo-in, but now several “polls” (not from any of the big names in polls, mind you, but outfits like the “InsiderAdvantage poll” and others with very shaky credentials) have been indicating a come-from-behind effort by Republican Scott Brown. Some of these fly-by-night outfits are reporting that Brown has as much as a nine-point lead over Coakley, while others are suggesting that the race is in a dead heat.

We think that when all is said and done, that the people of Massachusetts will be sending a Democrat back to the Senate, and at a margin that will make today’s frantic squawking by the media look for all the world like the insanity that it is. Well, maybe insanity isn’t the right word; they are doing this on purpose, after all, and we’re sure that they know exactly what they are doing.

This kind of manufactured delusion is par for the course for today’s media, who are more interested in making sure that the government remains in a constant state of turmoil than in reporting actual news. From their twisted viewpoint, reporting on people being at one another’s throats is much more interesting than reporting on a cooperative government that is putting through programs that actually help the American people. While the loudest and most destructive of these come from outfits such as Fox (ahem) News, talk radio, and shrill web tabloids like The Huffington Post, Politico, and The Beast, news organizations from across the spectrum have taken to engaging in the decidedly uncivil discourse that keeps American politics from being able to do anything even remotely constructive. As they “prove” time and again that the American system of governance is ineffective, not just insensitive to the peoples’ needs, but downright criminal, they risk that the people will one day rise up, take to the streets, and move to overthrow the government, and what a great story that will be for them to cover.

Even on the more thoughtful, supposedly “balanced” PBS Snoozehour, we find Gwen Ifill and Margaret Warner engaging in questions more framed at provoking argument than any thoughtful insight. It’s subtle, to be sure, but the careful viewer will be sure to spot it. Jeffrey Brown, Ray Suarez, and Judy Woodruff, tend to keep the discussion from veering off into that ugly ditch, professionals that they are, but Ifill and Warner seem to think that controversy trumps reasoned discussion. If things don’t work out for them at the Snoozehour, they’d fit right in at any of the cable and broadcast news organizations, where the word “news” has become as ironic as phrase “fair and balanced”. As for Jim Lehrer, well, one can only watch in horror as his Alzheimer’s becomes more pronounced with each passing day.

But we digress …

President Obama wasn’t even given a year to get his arms around the enormous set of problems left for him by the previous administration, a mess than would have tested the mettle of Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, before the media started whipping up a political maelstrom, propping up the obstructionist Republicans in the Senate who stand like a monolith, a Great Wall of Morons, against any program put forth by the President. The result is that the media has aided and abetted the jettisoning of Obama’s health care program, and then used its failure as the basis for their conclusion that the “Average American” is fed up with “Obamacare”, despite the fact that upwards of 60% of the electorate wants a public option.

Of course, you can be sure that the TV news stars have great health care with their employers, so there isn’t a one among them who has to bear the consequences of the failure of the Obama health care plan. It was win-win; a great story with no risk.

And now the media has decided that the Massachusetts Senate race would be much more interesting if they made up some poll numbers to indicate that the seat held by “the liberal lion of the Senate” for 47 years is at risk for being taken by a Republican, and how this represents the opening salvo in the 2010 mid-term elections, which is merely a preview of how the Democrats are going to be swept out of power on a wave of media-inspired anger in 2012.

These people in the media are writers, after all, a few of them are, anyway, and it only makes sense that, frustrated fiction writers that they are, they would want to “pre-write” the news in a way that would have a much more compelling narrative than the every-day stuff that the real reporters, the ones with the print news organizations, are out in the field getting for them. The only problem is, rather than just being an interesting story, the collapse of the American system of government is exactly the road that they have us on. How much longer can our nation withstand this constant assault before the pillars of government crack under the strain? And then where will we be?

We think that the American voters are smart enough to see through this media attempt at usurping their government of the people, by the people and for the people. We think that the American people will vote what’s in their hearts, not what some bozo on TV tells them. Oh, some of them will do what their Fox (ahem) News masters tell them to do, but for the most part, the people will do the right thing. You know, the media tried another electoral manipulation in an upstate New York Congressional district a couple of months ago, and the voters proved them wrong then, too.

Just as the voters in Massachusetts will today.