(Slow news day edition.)

• In case you wanted another reason to cuss Boeing’s current management (besides paying no taxes whilst living off the Pentagon teat), Glenn Hurowitz at the local eco-zine Grist chides ’em for falling behind Airbus in the race to make more eco-friendly aircraft. Then he cites this as just one more example of Boeing’s corporate ball-dropping:

Boeing is still paying for abandoning its once-successful strategy of long-term investments in innovative, groundbreaking products like the 747 jumbo jet in service of short-term profits meant to goose its quarterly earnings.

• Longtime readers know I almost never quote NPR here. (Heck, I almost never listen to that marathon snoozefest of self absorption.) But here’s a neat little item by them about “how much does it cost to make a hit song?” The song in question is a producer-driven Rihanna track. As one web-page commenter to the story noted, nowhere in the entire piece is the word “musician” uttered. Indeed, nowhere is it mentioned how any non-vocal sounds on the recording are created.
• If there were still going to be daytime soaps, here’s a new potential plot chiché for them: frozen fertilized embryos. Siblings conceived at the same time but born years apart.
• David Swanson thinks he knows how we actually could get Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court…
• …while Ezra Klein’s got a handy rhetorical device for following the federal debt-ceiling debate hoohah. Whenever a Republican is quoted blathering about “taxes,” replace the phrase with “blowing up the moon.”

• Somebody’s buying PopCap Games, the Seattle maker of utterly cute video games, for a cool billion. But who? If, as rumor has it, the buyer is gaming giant Electronic Arts, what will happen to the PopCap office and staff?
• Somebody at Huffington Post has compiled a list of 10 brands expected to die by 2012. American Apparel. Nokia. A&W restaurants (at least in the US). Even Sears. (No, not Sears!)
• Fareed Zakaria at Time looks back wistfully to a past when conservatives at least pretended to be pragmatic, even “reality based.”

• I’ve ranted here in the past about certain dot-coms whose whole reason for being is verbal content, but which refuse to pay their writers. Turns out that even “content mill” dot-coms that do pay their writers work them to death. Lots of unpaid overtime, high quotas, short schedules, no pretense of quality, everything search-engine-optimized to smithereens. And the results didn’t even work fiscally, as recounted by “an AOL content slave.”
• Non-news of the day: Ebooks don’t need printers but they still need editors.
• The Brave New Films dudes have a handy dandy guide to the Koch Bros.’ moves behind the scenes of the right wing opinion machine; while Mr Jon Stewart lists a few dozen Fox News lies.
• As you know, I don’t like it whenever a woman brands “men,” as a singular collective entity, as “potential rapists.” I also don’t like it when a man does much the same thing—as a convoluted explanation of/justification for sexual assault. This man, whom I sorry to say shares my birth date, is the real Dilbert.
• Daily Kos has uncovered a Congressmember who loves Green Lantern and is willing to admit it.

A UW prof published a study blasting military recruiting at inner city high schools as “abusing” parental trust. Naturally, Bill O’Reilly’s all up in exaggerated arms about her. And, naturally, he’s got his facts as well as his “patriotism” all wrong.

We’ve got our part to do to keep the right wing sleaze machine from controlling the Senate. That part is the re-defeat of Dino Rossi.

Want another reason? Rossi’s been holding seminars on how to profit from the foreclosure crisis. Call it financial schadenfreude, or just call it cynical hustling. Whatever you call it, it ain’t what I call the sort of character we need in DC right now.

If you love political snark and the vilifying of easy big-boy targets as much as I do, you’ll love “Stop Spewman.” It’s a series of Web ads starring Jack Black as your ultimate astroturfy corporate shill (not that he has to exaggerate very much to make the shtick look ludicrous).

There are many threads of influence beneath today’s extreme right wing faux-populism. Here’s one: the religious, political, and sales cult that is Amway.

With newspapers struggling and investigative reporting disappearing from the commercial media, online efforts are afoot to bring original reporting to the Net. But who’s gonna pay for ’em? How about  right wing think tanks?

The NYTimes opinion section’s former token far-rightie and well-regarded grammar snoot had previously written some of Nixon and Agnew’s most infamous lines, in a speechwriting staff that also included MSNBC’s token wingnut Pat Buchanan. But by modern standards, he was an example of that rapidly dwindling species, a sane Republican who believed in rational persuasion rather than X-treme demagoguery. He’s already missed.

Mount Holyoke College prof Douglas J. Amy insists that “Government is Good,” and has a whole detailed site all about why.

Cenk Uygur, meanwhile, explores the other side of this ideological divide, and decides today’s big business power-grabbers aren’t interested in democracy or even capitalism; but that’s only to be expected from “corporatists.”

Political PR maven Jonah Sachs insists progressives have gotta stop being so damned rational. He argues that public opinion in this country isn’t swayed by analytical arguments but by emotional appeals.

Guess who uses social-media sites the most? That long-neglected demographic caste, the stay-home moms.

Paul Krugman wrote it weeks ago, but I’m still trying to get to the end of his long essay asking the musical question, How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? The answer to his query’s easy, really. Economics is either the most or second-most fraudulant “science” out there (competing with sociology). Economic theory has less to do with the world most of us live in and more in common with the virtual worlds created by or for role-playing gamers

Henry Gibson, who passed away Monday, had a long and solid acting career ranging from Nashville to Magnolia and Boston Legal. But he’ll always be known as “the Poet” on the original Laugh-In. Gibson was a prime example of that show’s basic premise. Laugh-In was suit-and-tie guys (what we’d now call the Mad Men generation) looking gently askew at Those Darned Hippies. Saturday Night Live, by contrast, WAS Those Darned Hippies.

At least Gibson died without the tragic career footnote faced by Peter, Paul and Mary co-singer Mary Travers. She faced her cancer-ridden final months with the indignity of having one of her group’s hit songs reworked into the unauthorized political hatched-job “Barack the Magic Negro.”

IT’S MID-APRIL, and that means two topics are filling the op-ed sections across America’s newspapers:

(1) Calls for income tax “reform” (i.e., commentators wishing lower taxes for members of their particular favorite subcultures, and higher taxes for members of other subcultures); and

(2) Conservatives (plus a few highbrow-academic liberals) pontificating prosaically about baseball as The Most Perfect Thing On Earth.

I happen to like baseball. I just don’t like most of the people who write about it as some secular/sacred rite.

Herewith, some of the real resons folks such as George Will love the sport:

• It’s got lots of numbers and stats. Those academic types love such abstract-logic building blocks. So much more fun to keep track of numbers and stats than to follow a sport where raw athletic prowess makes more of the show.
• It can be long and boring, and hence reward its diehard adherents with the sanctimonious feeling of being able to appreciate something that puts ordinary people dozin’.
• It’s not based around a male sexual metaphor. Instead of relishing in something as crudely pagan and life-affirming as symbolic insemination moments (like football, soccer, hockey, et al.), it symbolizes an obsession Republicans can more easily identify with–
• It’s all about control vs. chaos. That PBS miniseries five years ago noted that baseball’s “the only game where the defense controls the ball.”
• The defensive star is at the literal center of the action. A soccer or hockey goalie merely stops offensive attacks. A baseball pitcher, by contrast, is the start of every play, the instigator of all action, the man who’s personally credited with winning or losing the game for the whole team.
• The game ends with the regaining of control (i.e., an out). The only exception is a bottom-of-the-last-inning play that scores a go-ahead run. The offensive side can only cause enough moments of chaos that cause enough damage before order is regained.
• It has a historic hierarchy. Major League Baseball as we know it was formed in 1903. The same 16 teams were in the same 11 Northeastern cities for 50 years. And in most of those years, the three New York teams regularly stood atop the standings; the old St. Louis Browns and Washington Senators regularly occupied the cellar. Everywhere else, baseball was “The Minors,” teams graded AAA to D and usually controlled by a major-league team’s farm system.
• A “Perfect Game” is one in which nothing happens. In bowling, the only other major sport to have the concept of a perfect game, such a game is one in which everything happens.

But you don’t have to dislike baseball just because certain tweedy butt-kissers like it. There’s plenty to enjoy about the game. If the Repubs can root for the defensive players who maintain order, you can root for the hitters and runners who, every so often, succeed in breaking through for glorious moments of triumphant chaos.

TOMORROW: James Twitchell, an academic author who (hearts) the culture of marketing.

ELSEWHERE:

• If you liked the They Might Be Giants cover of “Why Does the Sun Shine?”, here’s the original, along with the rest of the Science Songs LP series! (found by Memepool)…

…from the handsome Seattle City Council chambers. The room, and the new City Hall it’s in, may go down in history as among the last huge publicly-funded examples of New Seattle world-class-osity before economic conditions made such statements fiscally obsolete.

Today’s meeting is of the council’s Culture, Civil Rights, Health and Personnel Committee. (I wouldn’t have put all those functions in one heap, but what do I know?)

Nick Licata heads this committee. Jean Godden and Tom Rasmussen are also here. Right now, they’re going through regular committee business, to wit interviewing potential members of a LGBT health task force. The item I’m here for, a panel discussion on saving daily newspapers, will follow later in the meeting.

So let me give you a verbal image of the chambers, since many of you haven’t been here. It’s a big, bright, uber-clean room finished in light wood tones, glass, polished steel, and black vinyl seat covers.

Now the newspaper panel’s being seated.

Your panelists are:

• Roger Simpson and Doug Underwood, UW communications profs.
• Liz Brown, Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild.
• Tracey Record, West Seattle Blog.
• Anne Bremner, co-chair of Committee for a Two-Newspaper Town.
• David Brewster, founder of Crosscut and Seattle Weekly.
• Jennifer Towney, Peoria (IL) Newspaper Guild (by phone).
• Beth Hester, station manager, Seattle Channel.

Licata’s now reading from Jim McDermott’s P-I guest op-ed. I’ll post a link to it later. (Update: Here it is.)

Now, Licata’s reciting statistics about the Huffington Post. It’s more popular than all but eight newspaper sites. He didn’t mention that HuffPo still doesn’t pay its bloggers.

Licata sez he loves reading print, but acknowledges “we may all have to adopt to our changing ways.”

Prof. Roger Simpson tells of his long career working for newspapers and being a scholar about them. We’ve had daily newspapers for 220 years. Presently 1,400 dailies in the US, down 200 from 20 years ago. Total readership’s steadily declined also. In 1900, most households got 2-3 papers a day. Now, less than half even get one. “The newspaper though has always been the center for the consciousness of a community.”

The government, Simpson notes, has been wary of regulating this industry from an antitrust standpoint, until joint operating agreements were OK’d in 1972. Twenty-nine JOAs eventually formed. Today there are only nine JOAs left, including Seattle’s.

Prof. Underwood continues the talk about the industry’s changes. The newspaper we know is a product of an industrial era, and is subject to changes in technologies. JOAs, he says, were undermined when the Feds allowed the second papers in St. Louis and Miami to shut down but continue to share profits with the surviving papers of their towns.

Underwood says local-monopoly papers have become stodgy, and are having a hard time transforming themselves. Sites like HuffPo draw readers more effectively than papers’ sites with personalities and panache. But sites like HuffPo “depend on existing news companies to provide the product they riff off of.” In Norway the govt. subsidizes second newspapers in major cities. Should we?

Bremner: We started the Committee for a Two-Newspaper Town [CTNT] in ’03. Every citizen has a public responsibility. There’s so many important issues for us in having two newspapers in this town. We were pleased to be involved all the way in preserving the P-I for a while.

Bremner introduces Kathy George, one of her committee colleagues (and a onetime P-I reporter). She says they’re considering all options. A few ideas people are kicking around: Finding a civic-minded buyer or group to buy the P-I. The city council could provide leadership in guiding a purchase. Creating an endowment or non-profit to support in-depth reporting on local government and other community interests. Creating an employee-owned newspaper, such as the one in Omaha. You’ve read in local blogs about the possibility of creating a local public development authority. An online-only P-I is better than no P-I. But CTNT calls on Hearst to reveal its intentions as soon as possible, and to publicly reveal whether Hearst is making its annual, required $1 million payment to reserve its first right to buy the Seattle Times, should the latter be offered for sale. The public’s help in seeking these answers is invited.

Godden asks if an online-only P-I would still be part of a JOA. Kathy says the terms of the JOA are ambiguous about this.

Jane (sorry, no last name recorded here), another CTNT associate, asks Underwood about Norway’s subsidized papers. Underwood says there are official barriers keeping governments from influencing editorial content in these papers.

Licata asks Brown about Hearst announcing it may fire all the P-I staff. Brown mentions the Rocky Mountain News, Detroit News, and Chicago Sun-Times facing potential demise. The Baltimore Sun and Minneapolis Star-Tribune are in bankruptcy.

Newspaper Guild membership has gone from 820 to 420 members locally since ’00. Unionized press workers have gone from 140 to 43. Some 120 P-I jobs may be lost.

Brown says the Guild’s negotiating severance conditions with the P-I. She says Hearst said they didn’t know whether they’ll keep the option to buy the Times. “You don’t hear a lot of journalists out there talking about what’s happening… I don’t think they feel empowered to talk about the conditions of their industry.”

Towney, on the phone from Illinois, expresses her alarm about Starbucks’ layoffs. “Coffee and newspapers go together.” She lauds the value of reporters who have the time/money for long term research. Models she’s explored: Employee ownership, co-op ownership (“serving members over profits, in this case readers”), and non-profit ownership, a la NPR. She notes four papers in the US are owned by charitable trusts, but the papers themselves are still organized as for-profit entities. Her Peoria group opted to explore a hybrid of the three models. It would have both employee and community stockholders, and would be tied somehow to a subsidized non-profit. The Peoria paper had been employee-owned in the 1980s, then sold to a chain for $175 million. But that chain put it up for sale in 2006. The staff looked to the community for help. The paper was bought by another chain instead. The Peoria Guild held a public meeting to gather support. “The only thing stopping us from putting it out to the community is we don’t have a credible [business] model if we run a paper the way papers are run the way they’ve been run.”

Towney continues: They next explored an “L3C” organization. “Low profit limited liability corporation.” A foundation can invest in it. Its charter says community service comes before profit. Companies under it must create jobs and provide vital social benefits. “It opens up new funding channels.” The IRS, though, has consistently denied non-profit status to newspapers. Congress is now about to introduce a bill to allow L3Cs nationally.

Record: When you talk about saving newspapers, you really talk about saving journalism. Newspapers as a product and an organizational model may be becoming obsolete.

There are new ways of news gathering and dissemination coming up. In some ways they may be better than newsprint. Her site and similar ones around town have 100,000 regular readers; specifically in neighborhood-specific info. “We are serving our neighborhoods on a granular level to a greater extent than may have ever been done before.” Don’t be afraid of the future necessarily. Find ways to support journalism, the people who do the incredible work. This may be in blogs and smaller online operations. Her site is finally paying its way. Also: More discussion should be put into increasing information access to seniors and low-income people who don’t have computers.

Brewster: The news industry needs to find other bases of revenue other than advertising. The promise of flow of advertising revenue to the web is still a promise but it has slowed down. There are six other local web-only news sites around the country. In San Diego, Dallas, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Vancouver. The ones that are doing well are non-profit. Crosscut has converted into a non-profit corporation, Crosscut Public Media. It goes from one revenue stream, advertising, to three. The others are membership, as in public radio, and grants.

“Allow these web developments to flourish instead of planting new big oak trees to overshadow them.” Good stuff will grow underneath that if you let them and don’t impose solutions.

Young readers are very adept at navigating this [online] landscape. It doesn’t take the kind of mediation and paternalism these older models have provided.

Relax a bit. Allow the creativity, the ingenuity to figure what are good ways this will come about. It probably won’t be the Twin Peaks model of two equally large newspapers. It will probably be something with one large peak and 14 smaller peaks.
Licata asks Brewster, are these web projects hobbies for their contributors or real careers? Brewster: about three quarters of Crosscut’s writers are reimbursed, some at wages that can get you through life, some below that. The model is definitely to pay writers. Record: Our writers are paid, and we expect pro journalism standards from them.

Hester: Our footprint is local. While we don’t have great numbers of viewers on cable, online our numbers have grown tremendously; 5 million hits last year, twice the year before. We’re definitely trying to accommodate the transition to online. I don’t mean just taking our television product and putting it online, but providing additional information and interaction.

I don’t have the answer for print, other than this: We’ve actually been the beneficiary of corporate media downsizing. We’ve been able to use the resources of very talented people who’ve worked here in print and TV.

Yet we certainly don’t have the capacity to make up for the loss of talent in investigative reporting that comes from print journalism.

Underwood talks about the need for “the public sphere.” The Super Bowl’s the only place anymore where you can run ads that everyone will see. For many years, our democracy has thrived despite horrible coverage by the newspapers. Our UW interns provide half the Olympia press corps of the entire state. There are ways to do better journalism than has been done by the dailies. But where do we re-create the “public sphere,” some viable place which carries a sense of importance.
Someone in the audience asks via a notecard if the P-I could become a regional insert in the NY Times. Underwood remarks that we’d have to see it the NYT remains viable.

Brewster lauds the cooperation and “coop-etition” among online news sites/blogs.
Bremner: It’s not blogs or papers. It’s both. But there’s civic pride at stake here. We’re losing a part of Seattle.
Godden asks Simpson about the role of universities in supporting an independent voice in local journalism. Simpson notes the UW’s intern programs and other ways the U connects to the community. Underwood notes the Univ. of Missouri runs the “second paper” in Columbia MO. Serious journalists in all these areas will need to get together and figure out what the new model is.

Record notes corporate ownership of media isn’t necessarily something to save at all costs.

Licata asks how these new models will allow people the time for investigative reporting, and jokingly states, “the city of Seattle is not going to buy the P-I.” Yet he’d like to play a role in finding a solution. “I think at least we helped in this event to raise awareness.”

I’m back home now. What did we learn from this?

We learned about L3C corporations. A quick online search seems to imply these currently exist only in Vermont. And we heard a lot of people give general ideas on how the journalism profession as a whole may be going in the next few years, or how they wished it would be going.

We didn’t hear any concrete schemes to save the printed P-I and/or seattlepi.com.

But then again, it’s still Hearst’s thang, to sell or scrap as it wishes.

I wish there was some real civic leadership around here, to herd and announce a big group of civic-minded investors to first take the P-I local, then to mold the product and the organization into something with staying power.

Every now and then one of these “gender” pundits proclaims that political conservatives have absolutely no tolerance for, or vision of, female sexuality.

Bosh.

There is a right-wing female sexuality. Several, in fact. You might not be particularly turned on by/approve of ’em, but they’re there.

This was proven back in the pre-Reagan ’70s, with Marabel Morgan’s once-popular paperback book The Total Woman. In it, Morgan extols the ultra-eager-to-please wife, who might not have a career but who works damned hard to keep energy in the marriage bed.

The current edition’s Amazon page is chock full of juicy, snarky customer comments. Most of the commentors howl at Morgan’s vision of female totality as little more than passive-aggressive bimbodom.

But is Morgan’s fantasy woman really that passe?

Perhaps she’s simply been succeeded by another set of ideals.

Morgan’s vision of the conservative feminine libido belonged to a conservatism that was already fading when her book came out.

It was a conservatism of hierarchy, of rules, of clearly defined social roles. A conservatism of modest luxury and quiet good taste, when business executives at least still talked about prosperity for all; when politicians at least still talked about civility.

Those days are long gone.

The organized thuggery and egomania that are today’s “conservative” culture are topics I’ve ranted about before, and probably will again.

But with a changed culture come changed personal roles. That includes female roles. (I’ve already written that the sole positive thing I can say about Bush is he respects strong women.)

I happen to have had acquaintances of differing degrees with a few of these modern right-wing women. I won’t get into the sordid particulars.

Let’s just say I’ve seen what a new Marabel Morgan might write about in gushing tribute.

I’m sure you can, too.

And as soon as I’ve figured out how to add them newfangled comment threads to this site, I’ll ask you to add your own suggested chapter titles for a new self-help tome, Nookie for Nubile Neocons.

‘Til then, take these as inspiration:

• “You don’t need a pool to have a pool boy!”
• “You never feel so empowered as when you’ve fired half your employees!”
• “Jamaica’s best gigolos!”
• “Keeping your lover away from hubby’s mistress!”
• “Fine handcrafted dildos for under $3,000!”
• “Your new corner office–it’s incomplete without your own ‘casting couch!'”
• “Marrying a closeted gay politician–no pesky sexual demands, AND you get to be a public victim when he’s found out!”
• “Turn that spare guest house into a dungeon! Have fun, AND frighten the household staff!”

I’ve been reading Glenn Greenwald’s new book,
A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency. As you might expect, it’s a mighty depressing read.

Salon contributor Greenwald’s thesis is evident from his title:

• Greenwald believes the whole BushCo machine is run by a cabal of pompous authoritarian dweebs suffering from delusions of Godhood. These dudes n’ dudettes have cynically manipulated politics, the media, and the whole social zeitgeist for their own collective power/money trip.
• One of their principal tools has been to spread fear–fear of the unknown, fear of the stranger, fear of the foreigner, fear of the brown-skinned, fear of what conservative-bashing liberals call “teh gay,” fear of the intellectual, fear of the different.
• In a related tactic, they’ve positioned themselves, at least in their own minds, as the guardians and sole assayers of all that is Truly Good. Anyone who dares to differ from or disagree with the BushCo line is, if not directly Evil, then at least Evil’s co-dependent, hence deserving of the most virulent insults and smackdowns.Everything that’s gone so titanically wrong in the Administration, and in the country and the world, is either a direct result of this mentality or has been markedly worsened by it.

That’s all fine and scandalous as far as it goes.

And it fits something I once wrote in an essay in which I attempted to become the next Robert Fulghum: “The really evil people don’t say ‘I’m evil.’ They say ‘I’m so completely Good, I can do evil things and it’s OK.”
But how accurate is Greenwald’s depiction?

What if the Bushies (or at least some of them, some of the time) aren’t really that inflexibly bull-headed?

What if some of ’em know they’ve been behaving like SOBs and con artists? What if they privately relish in this behavior, in a bad-boy “ain’t I a stinker?” way?

It wouldn’t change the horrible mess the Bushies have made of our economy, our ecology, and our Constitution.

But it would change history’s judgment.

And besides, as I’ve said before, demonizing The Other isn’t just something “Those People” do.

Just look at the comic strips This Modern World and Get Your War On, which conflate anti-war and anti-Bush protest with the most prejudiced hipster square-bashing, as if all short-haired necktie wearers were reactionary neocons and vice versa.

In reality, there are many “nerds against nukes,” and more than a few right-wingers with hip aspirations of one sort or another (fundamentalist punk bands, metrosexual CEOs, etc.).

America can’t defeat the influence of brutal intolerance by imposing it on our own people.

And the left can’t win over America’s hearts and minds if it practices its own reverse prejudices.

…without the “writers’ embellishments,” but now it’s a total scream. It’s Effin’ Unsound’s annotated Bush in Bellevue speech.