Across the Great Divide

The Call of the Buck.

Some of this from Jon Talton about his days at the Rocky Mountain News at the height of its wars with the Denver Post sounded familiar:

Every morning, I picked up the two papers on my doorstep in fear of what the Post had done to me. The Post's business editor did the same. There was no time for Gannett foolishness. People in Denver and Colorado -- and these were Western regional newspapers, not flimsies focused on suburban features -- demanded news.

During the early '70s I spent some time writing about the performing arts for the Minneapolis Star when it was the afternoon counterpart to the Tribune, and the papers shared a building, presses and publisher.

We typically returned to the paper to write after a play or music performance, so our reviews would appear in the next afternoon's edition. That meant we'd be at work when the early morning edition of the Tribune was printed, and someone walked through the newsroom dropping copies on our desks.

We'd turn to the B section to see if our rival critics managed to slip a story or review into the paper ahead of us, or if they'd taken a better tack on something we'd covered. We'd feel a fresh squirt of competitive juices — quite helpful in the middle of the night with a deadline looming — and reassure each other that our work was superior, probably more often than it was.

We smoked at our desks, drank vending machine coffee made with the extra-strong button punched, and wrote using manual typewriters to crank out our copy on rolls of newsprint we could mark up with a fat #2 pencil. If revisions got too extensive, we'd retype entire sections and use rubber cement to paste together a continuous strip we would submit — after counting out the lines to make sure we fit the assigned news hole.

The next day, we'd read our work to see what the night copy editor had done to us.

Things are different now in so many ways, but the big one is not the web. Talton says it here:

By this time the legendary newspaper chain was not run by newspapermen or newspaperwomen, not run by publishers. It was run by businessmen. As in so many industries, they could care less what they did -- it was all about the money. No wonder they couldn't see the tectonic shifts coming in the late '90s and blaze a trail to survival. No wonder they wouldn't even consider an electronic paper with a tiny staff, even as "digital newspapers" like Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo do well. One would only do such things if one felt a deep calling, not just the call of a quick buck.

(h/t Mark Gisleson)

Who's Being Stimulated?

If the government is to tell big business men how to run their business, then don’t you see that big business men have to get closer to the government even than they are now?
–Woodrow Wilson

Quoted in this piece by Edward L. Glaeser:

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, I also argued that it would be far better to give generous checks to the poor hurt by the storm than to spend billions rebuilding the city, because those rebuilding efforts would inevitably help connected contractors more than ordinary people.
[...]

Sensible infrastructure projects wouldn’t disproportionately employ the least-skilled Americans. Forgoing the payroll tax for households earning less than $75,000 a year is surer progressivism than bridge-building.

Deer in the Headlights.

Two unemployed young men of my acquaintance came into possession of some venison a few weeks ago. February is well past hunting season and one of them is a country boy trained in covert military operations, so I considered the possibility the meat might not have come packaged from a food shelf.

 It came from a friend of the country boy, the other said.

My suspicions were raised further when I learned they received an entire deer, and the country boy butchered it himself. But I let it drop.

Yesterday, I saw one of them. He mentioned they'd just finished off the last of the venison stew.

Tell me again, how did that "friend" come into a deer out of season?

It was killed by an avalanche, he said. (To be clear, these guys are in Minnesota, not Colorado.)

I laughed pretty hard at that answer, thought about it for few seconds, and then laughed even harder.

Notes on the New Economy: Good Things Coming to an End.

I spent my wonder years as a Denver Post paperboy, which meant once a month or so we canvassed sections of our mountain town selling subscriptions to the afternoon and Sunday paper. Our competition was the hated Rocky Mountain News. Our sales pitch, when it wasn't "help me win a trip to Lakeside Amusement Park/Cheyenne Frontier Days/Disneyland," was based on the superiority of the Post's "sectionalized" structure.

So I never warmed to the rival "Rocky." The tabloid's format just never felt right. Even 50 years later, I still have a visceral negative reaction, the same way kids who grow up in Chevy families will never drive Fords. But tomorrow, the paper owned by Scripps, the company that recently shuttered the Cincinnati Post, closes up shop, and it's hard not to feel sorry to see it go.

In the past decade, the Rocky has won four Pulitzer Prizes, more than all but a handful of American papers. Its sports section was named one of the 10 best in the nation this week. Its business section was cited by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers as one of the best in the country last year. And its photo staff is regularly listed among the best in the nation when the top 10 photo newspapers are judged.

I was sure I'd written about the excellent "Final Salute" series that won two Pulitzers, but haven't found anything in my collected works. Todd Heisler's photography shows why the Pentagon didn't want pictures of caskets returning from Iraq. 

Dean Singleton, who also owns the St. Paul Pioneer Press, owns the surviving Denver Post, but it's not exactly robust, either. [Note: I've updated this to correct a misstatement that Singleton owned the Rocky. The two papers had a joint operating agreement.]

*****

Also on Friday, a well-regarded local design firm will close its doors. For decades, they've done very good work, nationally recognized, and as I was getting my company off the ground, they were an important collaborator. They designed our original logo, I wrote their capabilities materials, and we did some annual reports together. They did business with integrity and quality, and the only reason I'm not naming them is, I don't want to commemorate them here simply as a victim of a crappy economy, when they were so much better than that.

*****

On a totally different note, the sweat pants are back.

The Biking Experience, Winter Version.

The fleece-lined jeans and lobster claw gloves seemed like overkill on the way into the city, but by the time I started back, everything was about right.

This storm wasn't as bad as the one 15 months ago. For one thing, I was riding in daylight, and because it had been predicted, I was riding the right bike — my utilitarian Surly Otis with the knobby tires and 3-speed hub.

Still, there were two falls from ice slicks under the snow. Nothing of consequence, since at four miles per hour or so, the real fall is when your feet try to plant and slip away. And there's a nice cushion of snow, so the trick is simply not to be where an SUV is trying to prove something at the same time.

As you can see, I managed the trick.

People don't seem to believe me when I say I don't want a ride; this is part of the fun that comes from the wide range of experiences you get from biking everywhere. The "driving experience" is paltry and monochromatic in comparison.

Post-Ponzi Nation?

I spent my first morning back in town speaking to a wealthy, and by appearances, mostly retired businessman's group. (About a quarter of the usual attendees live in other states during the winter.)

The topic was "Building a Post-Ponzi Nation," and I was not kind to a nation that has expended much of its best thinkers on devising exotic financial products and tax-evasion strategies instead of solving the very real limits of finite resources on an planet with exploding population.

My host once chaired the state Republican party and now was regarded the token liberal of the group. The gentleman seated on the other side of me happens to volunteer in the same homeless shelter where I'm headed this morning.They must have picked my seat with some care.

I got more nods than I expected, but I never got into the details of the "raise taxes on the wealthy" part of my talk. We have to get beyond ideology on either side to solve these problems, I said.

One acquaintance came up to me afterward and said, "You've got to stop calling yourself a 'progressive.'"

"Why's that?"

"Because you said some things I actually agree with."

I'm not sure that indicates a groundswell. There were also some folded arms, and some surely embraced the Norquistian philosophy — lower taxes, deregulate, privatize and cut social spending — that I criticized. But here were about 30 men, some in their 80s, getting together weekly to challenge their thinking.

Next week, they've scheduled Secretary of State Mark Ritchey.

Zombie Bank Money Crawl.

Paul Krugman said the N-word a few days ago — what Calculated Risk calls “preprivatization.”

Arguably, the only reason [Citibank and Bank of America] haven’t already failed is that the government is acting as a backstop, implicitly guaranteeing their obligations. But they’re zombie banks, unable to supply the credit the economy needs.

To end their zombiehood the banks need more capital. But they can’t raise more capital from private investors. So the government has to supply the necessary funds.

[...]

The real question is why the Obama administration keeps coming up with proposals that sound like possible alternatives to nationalization, but turn out to involve huge handouts to bank stockholders.

Can you imagine the howl from the GOP and the chihuahua chorus if Pres. Obama actually advocated nationalization as a way of stabilizing the banking system? And from the banks and their shareholders if they actually had to accept the consequences of the risks they took?

So given the choice between a big play and no play, the feds seem to be taking the middle play, which is pretty much a hope and a prayer while continuing to put money in the collection basket.

*****

Oh, yeah, and the banks aren't the only ones shielding their big investors.

Help Me Raise Money So I Can Defeat the People Who are Using Me to Help Raise Money to Defeat Me.

Michele Bachmann sends out an email to supporters crying that the Democrats are using her "we're running out of rich people" statement to raise money "to use against me and other principled Members of Congress who are standing up to runaway spending in Washington."

You guessed it. Hers is a fund raising appeal.

Local Multi-million-dollar Scams Hardly Rate in the World of Billion-dollar Bunko Artists.

While big-time fraudsters are getting most of the attention around the world, there's another, local level of scammery that is being shaken out by shifts in the economy. These multi-million-dollar schemes may once have merited more attention, but now they just look like chump change.

In just the last several days in my western Colorado community, a former neighbor has skipped out on his house and a multi-state fraud investigation. Last night, a house seized by the Feds as part of a fraud and money laundering case burned under suspicious circumstances. Some local authorities believe it was torched to keep it out of government hands and being used to repay victims of an investment scam.

Then there's the disappearing pipeline construction firm.

What a legacy from the Bush years. They chase marijuana growers and alien smugglers while the big crooks are living large down the street.

Zen and the Art of Bicycle Maintenance.

There is that brief moment between the stupid thing and the consequences. Sometimes the gap is very, very long and sometimes it is short. Sometimes it is both.

My Colorado errand bike, a heavy Schwinn Imnotsurewhat, was acting strangely the other day when I hopped on for a short ride. It started dragging as I headed up the hill from my house, as if it were in too high a gear. Running it downhill, everything seemed fine, but the problem recurred when I turned back.

I had other bikes, so I parked it for the moment.

Today was clear, so I decided to check out the problem.

A digression is in order.

I find things on my rides. Some, like an elk head with the antlers chopped out, I leave behind. Other things, like the headless Barbie with body paint, I bring back.

I garland the baskets of my errand bikes with the cast-off dolls I find. This may seem eccentric, but it's actually quite practical. It's a pain to lock and unlock your bike during a grocery stop, so festooning it with stuffed animals and dismembered dolls tends to discourage the bike thieves who aren't deterred by the retro, slow-getaway nature of the bike itself.

One headless Barbie is a gift. A second is a sign from heaven. So I have a shiva Barbie bike.

Anyway, I must've been interrupted while replacing a rear tube on the bike on a previous trip, because the wheel had never been tightened down. (An odd-ball drum brake and old-style hub make rear tube fixes quite laborious.) The slowing I experienced was the drum brake cable tightening as the loose wheel was pushed further back in the dropouts as the bike went uphill.

As I righted the bike after securing the wheel, the heavy front fork swung around and my index finger was caught between the frame and the basket. The effect was that of tin snips taking a nip of knuckle skin.

So we are back to the moments. The long one, between the incomplete repair and its conclusion. The short one, between the swing and the nip.

Like when a toddler falls down and waits a moment before deciding to cry, my knuckle waited a moment to begin bleeding. Given the location and depth of the wound, I did a paperclip split and went on with life.

Things did not get better. A broken tooth, a decapitated elk and an invisible university extension office were just a few of the adventures involved, but I know how boring it can be to hear other people's weird dreams.

Even if they are real.