Category: Orphans

This afternoon I feel a need to decompress so I won’t be banging away at the keyboard for very long. If you don’t know to what or whom I refer below, I am sorry. I think most people who keep up with political news will recognize what I have to say. I just don’t feel like spoon-feeding today.

I will say though that after this week of seeing the opposition party at what unfortunately appears to be their finest it seems the Republican party seems to be headed headlong toward self-destruction.

It isn’t just that GOP congressional members at the height of their biggest defeat in at least 40 years did their best spoiled brat act. It isn”t that half of the GOP seems to have joined the “bat s**t crazy” wing of their party by egging on the nuts to violence. It isn’t that the GOP continues to excommunicate its best and brightest such as David Frum when given a cold taste of truth.

No it is all that and more. This very well could be the prelude to a “Whig moment” for the Republican party. Maybe that is what it needs to get on track or perhaps to let the more thoughtful members move to the Democratic party while the remainder form their own Party of Nuts. Personally, I prefer the former option, for either of the first two options.

One can reason with those who are sane and listen. I don’t even want to think about the other alternative.

Sarah Palin was in town today supposedly to sell motivation. Just how she is supposed to be motivating who knows? Maybe she was hawking the message: “You too can be an obscure politician with the sense of a pissant who can help lose a presidential election and then make millions of dollars by being a famous person!”

In keeping with the current trend of pissed-off, right-wing rhetoric, she told the crowd in the city just across the river from a one-time Ku Klux Klan haven “Don’t retreat–reload.” What a genius.

Her appearance at the forum,  which supposedly includes former New York mayor Rudi Giuliani and former Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw, comes the day of news that Palin will be the focus of a reality show on TLC. That ought to be interesting especially considering the subject is known for making statements that have no basis in reality. Someone once said Bradshaw couldn’t spell cat if you spotted him the “c” and the “t.” I think he’s kind of funny though. Giuliani, not so much.

People are just getting their bowels in an uproar over national politics and having a black person as president. I think a good number of folks, I am just guessing, probably hate the fact that Seamus O’Bama, is not a black Irish but rather a black Kenyan-American. Of course with his health plan and the opposition party which has just decided not to do diddly squat on anything, a lot of people are being whipped up in a frenzy. They are threatening Democratic politicians and being all nasty and s**t.

Me, I am more pissed over this.

Our local police department apparently hasn’t been catching enough people speeding by stopped patrol cars lately so they use a decoy. Now I know that police officers are in danger on the side of the road, as they are on the road, in the office, out on the streets and hanging in cop bars. That, plus the fact that you can get a ticket if you don’t, is the reason I try to get into a far left lane if I can or slow down 20 mph below the speed limit in the lane next to the stopped po-lice car.

Here in Beaumont, they are parking a patrol car on the shoulder and stopping people who violate the police-passing law.

I just have this pet peeve about being entrapped. Police seem to have more and more reasons to pull you over and get in your business. There is a database here in Texas where officers can instantly run your license plates and tell whether you have liability insurance. If you don’t, you get a big ticket. I wonder how many of these same people writing tickets complain of the mandatory insurance provision of the new health care law? Don’t see the iron in the irony?

Another trap I don’t like is where game wardens use fake deer to lure hunters to illegally shoot their weapons. To me that is just wrong and I don’t even hunt. I wonder how many Sarah Palin has shot? Decoy deer that is. And, what’s next fake fish? Fake bald eagles or whooping cranes? The nerve of people.

Perhaps it is an ominous sign that little has been heard recently of the seafaring war against pirates along the east African coast.

I would have given little or no thought about the goings-on there had I not read an article a short time ago about a Somali pirate having been fatally shot by a private security guard on board a Panamanian-flagged freighter owned by the United Arab Emirates. The incident appears to be the first such pirate killing by a private contractor.

In fact, some quick reading showed just how clueless I was about the situation over there. First, I had no idea of the military structure among international navies patrolling the Indian Ocean for pirates. Operation Atalanta is what the mission is called and involves the European Union Naval Forces, an entity I had largely forgot had existed.

The EU Navy is made up at the present time of navies from eight European states: Italy, Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg and Greece. Other countries, notably the United States, Australia and Japan are also among nations in the pirate-fighting business there.

But what I likewise didn’t know and is most disturbing is the extent of the problem right now over there. Two more cargo ships were hijacked Tuesday. One is a Bermuda-flagged vessel with owners from the British Virigin Island and a Maltese-flagged ship with a Turkish owner. This was the same day that the pirate was killed while the MV Almezaan managed to repel hijackers.

The fatal shooting of the pirate has set off alarm bells among some in the shipping industry. There are worries that the killing might spur more violence among pirates. Legal issues also complicate the situation especially where Somalia is involved as that country stews in anarchy.

It’s not a good situation over there and, as much as I would like to get back on the high seas, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that east African coast.

Anytime you receive unexpected money it has to be good. Even if it’s bad or if it turns out bad, when you look and see that check or cold, hard cash, it’s a good thing in my book.

I just got two very clean, very crisp $1 bills in the mail that look at the very least like the I-notes haven’t yet been used to snort cocaine. My serendipity comes courtesy of The Nielsen Company. Yes, the very ones that rate television programs.

The ratings company sent me a short questionnaire about television-related topics and I answered it and used my spit to seal it in their postage paid envelope. They even paid for the freaking postage after giving me $2 for about three minutes work, what guys!

I don’t know if they will send me more questions or if I will become an official member of the “Nielsen Family.” I hope so because, as people who read this blog either occasionally or regularly know, I will sure as shootin’ give my opinion. Especially for cash money. Especially for serendipitous cash.

Whether one likes or dislikes the outcome of the U.S. House vote last night approving the Senate’s health care reform package one might think some agreement could be found in that it was a historic moment.

Or so it would seem.

You don’t have to have spent 20 years in the newspaper business as I did to know there are some vast differences between electronic and actual newspaper consumption as to how news stories are conveyed to the reader. Headlines are what I am thinking.

Sure news via the Internet has headlines or whatever they’re called this week. But there is a world of difference — at least in my opinionated opinion (laugh track) — in the affect (yes, with an “a”) of the “72-point hed” of a newspaper and whatever size of a computer-generated headline. Those big, black, bold letters, be it on broadsheet or tabloid, just jump up, grab you and often times slap you silly. Then there is the judgment, or not, behind the big head.

A case in point is my local daily newspaper, the Beaumont Enterprise. The Hearst-owned publication is conservative in its editorial page side but usually doesn’t appear to cross the line too far on the news side with that stance. Their Web site is a whole different story and I just don’t have time to rant about it although the relatively new front-page makeover brings the dot-com element about a standard column and a half all down the paper’s right-hand side. Today it displays one of their idiotic Web polls which any thinking person — but if you read the reader comments on stories on their Web effort you will see thinking is in short supply — should realize means absolutely nothing.

Newspapers are a band wagon sort of enterprise, pardon the pun. One fad is a one-story front, or two, or three, big photos and so-forth. Today’s Beaumont paper has a main story and a sider as well as a third story on the bottom. Now one might guess that since the health reform passage was historic that it would be the main story perhaps with a sider of local reaction, doctors, political leaders and the like? No, it was a story titled: “Climb too steep” in an eye-grabbing but not “Second Coming” sort of point. The story was how the local Lamar University women’s basketball team, which was seeded 14 in the NCAA Regional Tournament in Austin, was defeated by the No. 3 seed West Virginia 58-43.

Now I watched that game while clicking back and forth to CNN to check on the status of the legislation as well as having had to surrender both altogether for the season opening episode on AMC of “Breaking Bad.” It was fantastic as I expected.

I suppose I can’t blame my local newspaper too much for its leading with the local team playing in the regional, losing, although I think something is a little out of whack whenever a huge sports story leads PI and is virtually absent in the sports section, cleverly named “@ Play.” My thought was: “Well, maybe I was wrong and the passage of a landmark health care bill wasn’t that big of a deal after all.”

So I checked out some of the papers showcased in the Newseum’s “Today’s Front Pages” section. I checked a few papers out at random and also looked at several which had local teams in the NCAA March Madness.

Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, the Post and Courier in Charleston, The Des Moines Register, The Dallas Morning News, several of these fairly conservative publications, all led with and had noticeable headlines on the legislation. The Spokesman-Review in Spokane had a large banner head: “Health Care Bill Passes.” It had a men’s and women’s teams from Gonzaga playing in the NCAA. Now only the women are left. They did have a large photo of the men’s team, which lost, with the headline inside the photo: “Bullied in Buffalo,” relating to where their defeat was suffered.

In Green Bay, Wisc., which one would think is a huge sports town despite its population being about 100,000 and about the size of Beaumont, the Green Bay Press-Gazette ran with the large banner “Health care reform passes” and a sub-hed “Republicans unanimously oppose $940 billion bill.” The Wisconsin-Green Bay women’s team beat Virginia last night and advances. It has a “reefer” or referred to the story at the top of the page for the sports section. The other front-page stories were about local census issues and on a statewide hate crimes report.

And what about the area paper of the team that beat Lamar? Well, The Herald-Dispatch in Huntington, W.Va., had a colorful banner with a reefer to the inside on all the region’s teams still surviving including West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio State. Its large photo is of Food Network star Jamie Oliver topping a story about his show featuring Huntington. A large head and text fills the right-hand side of the paper with the story about the health care bill. Oh well. That’s kind of half and half.

You can check out the headlines yourself and you will find some that ignored the historic bill as the huge story that it was but I think many of the editors across the nation realized the event’s enormity.

I will not try to second-guess my local newspaper. I learned long ago that if you ever tried to bet on how a paper would play a story you would be a big-time loser. I suppose one other of the newspaper’s attributes that is lost on the world of electronic news is the historic sense of the publication. Have you ever saved a newspaper after a historic event? Maybe it’s just me but I have stored somewhere front pages when Reagan was shot, the Challenger explosion, my lead story in the paper where I was working at the time of the Columbia explosion, the beginning of the Iraq War, 9/11 and more. I think I have saved most, at least sections, of the newspaper of just about every major and some minor stories I wrote.

The electronic news platform has yet to find a way that will grip its reader with the sense of the moment and the importance of that moment the way the newspaper does and has through its existence. I am not particularly happy with my local paper’s choice of story play, but that’s what makes this a great country. That and we have had this extremely contentious issue of health care and haven’t had a civil war. That is, not yet.