Dana Blankenhorn

The Age of Evil

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 31 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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In looking at the historical patterns which mark American history I have been searching for a comparison to the present decade.

• The 1960s were the turbulent decade. The heart of the Nixon Thesis was the divide on what you thought of those times.
• The 1920s were great times, followed by the sharp fall of the Hoover years. The period of turmoil leading to 1932 was relatively brief -- less than the distance in time from Katrina to here.
• The 1890s were only bad for some people. Labor and agriculture suffered, but we also saw the development of a stable middle class and real national markets.

The Cult of Bushism

I saw another one the other day.

It was a pick-up truck, a black "W the President" sticker in the window. No other adornment. No McCain stuff. Nothing about issues, nothing about the party.

The sticker looked clean, and new. Just like the "W '04" ovals I see on other big cars and trucks as I drive around Atlanta and its suburbs.

Very strange. Given the reality of our time, an economy in the tank, the American brand on the ropes, the air increasingly hazardous to your health, the cost of filling that car passing $100.

The question no one in the media or on the left is asking -- what's going on?

George W. Bush has become an -ism. And Bushism has become a cult, something we're going to have to contend with seriously in the years ahead.

What is Bushism?

Obviously the philosophy behind the politics of George W. Bush. But what is that, exactly? You can name the policy stands, but I'm more interested in the myths and values, the assumptions, which lie behind those stands.

None Dare Call if Terrorism

American terrorism is back. But the media won't call it that.

They may tiptoe around it. ""Church gunman says he acted out of 'hatred for the liberal movement'" writes USA Today, but do they call 58-year old Jim Adkisson what he is, a terrorist? Nope.

How about CNN? "Shooting happened during childrens' play," the headline admits. Yet no "t" word.

Had Jim Adkisson been a 30-year old Muslim, had he attacked a conservative Christian megachurch, do you have any doubt whatsoever that this would have been branded a terrorist attack? C'mon.

But this was a conservative American targeting a liberal American church, one with an historic record of opposing war, supporting government programs and, yes, even accepting gays. So is this terrorism, oh great New York Times? No, it's a shooting.

Even Wordpress's own page linking to stories on this horror doesn't call it terrorism. Most of the blogosphere is complicit in the silence.  They will talk about "serial killers." They will even talk about "guns."

Terrorism? Nope.  Just a few DFHs are telling the truth. The Blue Voice. Bob Cesca. Loring Wurbel. Nobody reads 'em. Nobody reads me either.

The Money To Do Online Journalism

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 30 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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We're on the verge of a breakthrough in journalism. A breakthrough in business models.

Publishers like ZDNet, where I now work, have found some success with incentive programs based on pageviews. They have good online publishing systems and ad staffs which can fill the corners of an online page with money-producing ads. By putting the two together, everyone can make a living.

Critics will note it can be tweaked a bit. I get a lot more traffic from trollbait than from innovative, interview-driven stuff, so when I'm hungry I go with the trollbait. Over time readers will notice, and it's up to the publisher to tweak their financial incentives to keep me on the straight-and-narrow.

If we could simply take this model into local news markets, we'd have enough money to pay for covering all those events and scandals which right now aren't being covered. The zoning games played with developers. The small corruptions of the local school boards. The side deals done to lure businesses to town. An open meeting is closed if there's no one there taking notes.

In his print column for July 28 Jonathan Alter of Newsweek (left) weeps bitter tears over this. "Bloggers rarely pick up the phone or go interview the middle-level bureaucrats who know the good stuff," he writes.

I know why. It doesn't pay.

This has always been true. You know how much of a print newspaper's budget goes to editorial? (This is also true for journals like Newsweek, by the way.)

8%!

That's all the writers, all the editors, the whole art department, the secretaries, the research people, everything. Over 90% of a newspaper's income goes elsewhere -- to the ad staff, to the printer, to the delivery guys, to the executive suite, to the bottom line. That's all you're really worth, Alter  -- a little piece of that 8%.

So there is plenty of room to create incentives for news-gathering. Advertising isn't disappearing. It's simply changing media -- from print to online. And newspapers simply aren't competing for that dollar. Because of attitudes like Alter's, which are divorced from the market.

The problem is this assumption of "authority" which positively oozes out of Alter's pores, and those of every other so-called journalist in this country. That's something your employer earns for you, and you try very hard not to toss away. It's a loan, not a grant, which comes from the market, not from God.

So here's the secret to making money online, doing real journalism, in 2008.

Simple Answer to Stupid Questions

Q: When will housing prices bottom-out?

A: When housing becomes affordable.

What do I mean by affordable?  I mean a family of median income can afford a median-priced home with 20% down, a standard 30-year mortgage, and obligating no more than one-third their income to monthly payments.

There is your problem.

The people who sell houses say we're there, but a look inside the figures show we have far to go. Homes in the Midwest and South are becoming affordable, but the median price there is south of $175,000. In the Northeast and West prices are still over $280,000, so those hard-hit markets still have far to go.

If banks in the Midwest and South had capital they could make good loans. But writing down the Big Shitpile destroyed their capital, destroyed their ability to make new loans.  That's what the new housing bill is all about, to enable lending on a sound basis.

Oh, and once we do get to affordability we have at least a year of inventory to sell before we can start building again. Add in the millions of homes which are not on the market, but whose owners want to sell (like my next-door neighbor, recently transferred) and you're looking at another year of pain before a bottom is reached.

There is a second problem which has yet to be addressed.

The Bailout

A lot is being written today about the proposed "bail-out" of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) which nearly collapsed last week.

Conservatives are screaming that there should be no bail-out, that the two should either fail or be fully "privatized."

This tells me something very important.

The bail-out should go ahead. But rather than just buying loans, it should be through an injection of equity.

While Fannie and Freddie helped to create the Big Shitpile by packaging loans and re-selling them to investors, the portfolio they actually hold isn't that bad. They don't hold ARMs. They don't hold balloon notes. They hold fixed-rate loans, most under $500,000. You know, the good stuff.

As housing values fall some of these loans go "underwater," the equity being worth less than the loan value. Some default, others must be marked down in value. There are losses as this works out.

But the losses are not unlimited. This may be one of the best portfolios in the business. If you buy up the equity (diluting existing shareholders), it's actually a good investment by the government. You and I will make money.

The Golden Rule

It's always amusing to watch Netroot bloggers fulminate and rend their garments over the right-wing bias of TeeVee and print journalists. (To the right is Howard Kurtz, symbol of this new age. Married to a right-wing hack, he dares sit as judge of everyone else's work.)

It's not because the bloggers are wrong. They're right. The vast majority of people who are given TeeVee speaking time or favored print positions are supporters of this war, endorsers of this President, and supporters of Sen. McCain.

But the Netroots is forgetting The Golden Rule:

He who has the gold makes the rules.

For 40 years conservatives based their myths and values on the idea of a "liberal media conspiracy" which was dieing the moment they spoke the words. Today we have two types of TeeVee and newspaper owners:

1. People like Rupert Murdoch, Pat Robertson and Sun Myung-Moon who run their properties as propaganda organs, and
2. Media conglomerates that have benefited enormously from the Bush-inspired consolidation of the last 8 years and have sent the word down that questioning the status-quo is risky.

You can say all you want about professions like politics, or the law, or big business. But in no profession is the idea of BOGU (bend over grease up) such a key to success as journalism.

How do you become a news anchor? How do you become a newspaper columnist?

You do it by climbing a corporate hierarchy.

Despite the meritocratic pretensions of the so-called profession, quality means a lot less in the search for modern "journalistic leadership" than a willingness to reflect what management wants said, and to ape that shamelessly.

An Amazing Life

I never knew or met Jo Stafford. I had never heard of her (unfortunately) before her death this week at age 90.

But I feel a bit like the great Tom Lehrer felt on reading the obituary of Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel -- wow.

According to The New York Times, Jo Stafford:

• Was the real sweetheart voice of WWII, "the vocal embodiment of every serviceman’s dream girl faithfully tending the home fires." She was known as G.I. Jo.
• Invented what became the act of Roger Miller, Al Yankovic and others with her 1947 hit "Tim-tayshun."
• Won the Grammy for best comedy album in 1961.
• Backed-up Frank Sinatra when he was with the Tommy Dorsey band.
• Was one of the first female stars for Capitol Records, which Sinatra later made famous.
• Taught Americans to appreciate Appalachian folk music, a key bridge in the development of country music.
• Created the first concept albums, including a Broadway album.
• Made a real live hit in 1977, a comedic version of the BeeGees' Stayin' Alive.
• Saw her hits re-released on her husband's Corinthian Records, a religious label.

The Whitening

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 29 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The picture at the top of this blog is something of a lie.

This is what I look like today.

The difference? I call it The Whitening.

It's something that comes to all of us sooner or later. It hits us when we are at our strongest, our most alive, our most joyful. I am going from being a red-bearded bald guy to a white-bearded one.

The Whitening is God's reminder that our time on Earth has a limit, that we have obligations to the future, and that we had better get on the stick.

We don't often talk about The Whitening. We watch it in others, we see it in the mirror. But we don't talk about it. Anyone notice Keith Olbermann since the 2004 conventions? The Whitening is happening. Anyone talking about it? No.

The Whitening is going to happen to Barack Obama, too. By the 2012 election he will look more like Nelson Mandela than the thin basketball player he portrays today. The Whitening.

The Next Boom

Some days every economist gets teh stupids.

Paul Krugman got a bad case today, in writing about the horrid state of the economy:

The Onion, as usual, hit the nail on the head with its recent headline: “Recession-plagued nation demands new bubble to invest in.”

But we probably won’t find another bubble  —  at least not one big enough to fuel a quick recovery.

Paul Krugman doesn't know a bubble when it's being blown up in front of his face. (That's Tom Noddy doing his bubble magic thing above.)

The next bubble is already here. It's called alternative energy. It's called The War Against Oil. Why do you think Boone Pickens is blowing so much hot air? What is turning Al Gore into an important venture capitalist?

Just as with the Internet 13 years ago, no one is sure in what direction this will go. It was just obvious back then the money was out there. That's why companies like Netscape and Yahoo had ginormous valuations before they got a dollar in revenue. Netscape failed, and Yahoo is failing, but that doesn't mean there wasn't a there there.

Ask the Google guys.