Eight Feet Deep

Vice President Joe Biden sent me an e-mail today urging me to stand and support the president’s nomination of federal circuit court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Why? Can’t I do it sitting down?

Of course, Joe sent the same e-mail to millions of others who normally get messages from President Obama and his minions updating us and soliciting our support on various issues through their vast electronic mail network. I hope Joe doesn’t get in trouble for using the presidential e-mail list.

It is incredible — the use of e-mail — for office holders and politicians to talk directly to their constituency. It isn’t a whole lot different from how congressional members used however much money that was allotted to them to mail newsletters or whatever to those back home. But it is faster. And Congress and everyone else requiring a fan base — like the Counting Crows just to name one — have of course taken advantage of e-mail for some time. But it all is relatively new for a president to do such a thing.

Now naturally there are certain percentages of any communication of any kind one gets from a politician that is pure bullshit. I am not sure what percentage but generally the rule of thumb is, the more words there are, the more likely many of those words will be bullshit. It is fascinating though the president can now use e-mail lists as a means of communication seeking support for various measures and votes.

Back to Joe, whether I am one of the “growing list of Americans who are pledging to stand with Sotomayor” remains to be seen. Oh I could just blindly go on what I’ve read or heard on TV about her since I learned of her nomination a couple of days ago. But as I have mentioned before the hot air dispensers on both sides of the aisle in the Senate are going to take their dear sweet time posing and posturing and pontificating in the run-up to a vote by the entire Senate, provided there will be one and there is no reason to doubt it as of now. So, I don’t see why I shouldn’t just wait and give the Senate their shot to worsen global warming by letting loose all that hot air.

Once that hot air is cleared, maybe I will have the opportunity to sort through the wheat and the bullshit to determine if I truly want to stand with Sotomayor.

But thanks for thinking about me Joe.

Dan Froomkin, whose White House Watch column appears on washingtonpost.com, penned a thoughtful piece for the Nieman Journalism Lab expressing the need for more passion in American newspapers.

Passion seems like a funny word to bandy about in connection with newspapers. That is, it is a rather odd association unless your experience with newspapers has only consisted of consuming the news. For many, though not all, who have toiled in some aspect of creating the beast that sometimes the final news product can be passion is a driving force that produces conscious consideration much less than that of a paycheck.

The problem with newspapers today, says Froomkin, is newspapers “play it too safe.”

“We need to come to terms with the fact that one reason we’re having such a tough time is that we are still fundamentally failing to deliver the value of our newsroom to Internet users,” he said.

What journalists do and are, and what Internet readers desire, is no different now than it has been way before the Internet arrived — at least as core principles are concerned. As Froomkin points out papers are more hindered than helped by a format that had more value in days past — the notion of objectivity originally used to bring in a wider readership is a good example he uses.

Froomkin said that the Internet does not work on a daily schedule and “abhors the absence of voice.”

“If we were to start an online newspaper from scratch today, we’d recognize that toneless, small-bore news stories are not the way to build a large audience — not even with “interactive” bells and whistles cobbled on top,” Froomkin said. “One option might be to imitate cable TV, and engage in a furious volume of he-said/she-said reporting, voyeurism, contrarianism, gossip, triviality and gotcha journalism. But that would come at the cost of our souls. The right way to reinvent ourselves online would be to do precisely what journalists were put on this green earth to do: Seek the truth, hold the powerful accountable, expose the B.S., explain how things really work, introduce people to each other, and tell compelling stories. And we should do all those things passionately and courageously — not hiding who we are, but rather engaging in a very public expression of our journalistic values.”

Some of the above is already done, Froomkin said. However, too often the powers that be obscure great stories in what he calls a “pseudo-neutrality” as well as other perceived sins such as newspapers fleeing from tone like lawyers running from Dick Cheney with a shotgun.

Perhaps a more simplistic notion would be that newspapers have been cornered by their own successes now that the immediacy and so-called “all the news all the time” of the Internet and Cable TV has made news (almost — I don’t think it’s completely there yet) a 24/7 phenomenon.

It’s like I was telling a friend with whom I had lunch today if I could only find a way to make money with the Internet … The same goes for those newspapers left standing to deliver a news product for a new frontier. To be or not to be may be the question but money is the answer.

The Obamarama made his first pick for the Supremes today, Sonia Sotomayor of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Sotomayor has a pretty compelling back story. It appears she doesn’t have a long judicial trail. But nevertheless, one may count on the opposition party on the Senate Judiciary Committee to bruise the candidate as much as is possible. It’s not just a GOP thing, as one should only look back at Justice Samuel Alito’s nomination hearings after President Shrub appointed him.

It seems for as long as I can remember and I am more than a half-century old the opposition party in the Senate has made the confirmation hearings a spectacle more like “Batter the court nominee.” Were such an exercise both useful and expeditious, then perhaps I would think better of it. But I think that it is pretty simple to understand the hearings for a prospective justice are nothing more than a political opportunity that both sides can exploit for their bases who are really riled up about hot-button court issues.

Then again, if Congress would only do what it needed to do in order to better the nation as a whole I am sure we would probably accuse them of being on drugs. And, most likely, they would have to all be smoking something if the members actually did their jobs in Congress rather than play politics.

The 2-year-old son of Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Harrison was taken to the hospital with severe but non-life-threatening injuries after he was bitten by a family pit bull. Harrison was not home when his wife let the dog out of a pen and it attacked the child.

Such stories have become all too common these days and raises many questions about who is most responsible for attacks by vicious dogs, man or dog breed. Well, say what you might about dog attacks, and specifically those which are labeled as “pit bull” attacks. There is an amazing amount of ambiguity when it comes to the reporting of dog attacks both by public officials and the media. A pit bull, or to be more precise a “bull terrier,” is ” … an exceedingly friendly dog, with a sweet and fun-loving disposition … ” according to the American Kennel Club. What actually gets reported as a pit bull attack may, in some cases, not be a bull terrier.

Today’s culture, in which some sectors believe that watching and betting on dogs killing and maiming each other, has contributed to what has become a public menace and it isn’t something limited to pit bulls. A Centers for Disease Control report said at least attacks by dogs from 25 different breeds were responsible for 238 human deaths over a 20-year period dating back to 1979. Some 58 percent of those deaths were a result of unrestrained dogs on their owner’s property.

Isn’t it fairly obviously from where the real problem stems? A Web site called pitbulllovers.com puts it very bluntly: “Pit bull attacks happen because people are irresponsible and ignorant.”

One feels reluctant to lay blame on someone when their loved ones have been hurt. But it should be mentioned that Harrison recently told reporters he skipped meeting President Obama with his fellow Super Bowl champion teammates at the White House because it wasn’t a big deal to him. It is there that we shall leave the matter with perhaps enough said.