We’re Done

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A month ago we asked ourselves, “Are We Done?”  Turns out… Yes, we are.

Madison’s last surviving daily newspaper is shrinking year after year. That’s a bad thing for Madison, bad for Dane county, bad for the region. Meanwhile, that same shrinking newspaper’s editorial page often blunders and postures and diminishes the larger organization’s chances of survival. It’s not a business plan we understand.

We used to comment on that puzzle, but now, we’ve apparently lost motivation to comment further. Even major blunders on the editorial page — howlers that in the past would surely have provoked us to sit down and write something — now just come and go.

We’ve seen maladroit handling of many an issue by the State Journal editorial page. This one for example. The part that’s just anti-labor screed is entirely predictable (the State Journal doesn’t care for unions, and the parent company, Lee, actually operates a website opposing unionization at any of its subsidiaries), but for the Wisconsin State Journal to charge that every elected body of local government — city, county, and school board (all three, in a single smear)  – is in thrall to labor unions is an outrageous and undeserved insult. And then… as if that weren’t enough, the editorial goes on to cite the NFL referee lockout (a strategy that had already exploded in a nationally televised stinkbomb when the Packers played the Seahawks) as an example of how labor negotiations are supposed to work??? It was amazingly dumb. We mean AMAZING.

But even so, we just sighed, lightly. That’s when we knew we were done.

There’s a world of good analysis elsewhere… serious stuff, informative, insightful, and surprising. There’s an even bigger world of amusements to spend time with. Why lose an hour writing about something that’s just fundamentally not that interesting? For a while we thought we had some answer. As it turns out, we don’t. Probably never did.

OK, that’s it. Unplug the jukebox. Empty the cash register. This joint is closed.

Wisconsin State Journal shrinks again

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The Wisconsin State Journal is laying off more staff. Cap Times not affected, as we read the stories, but State Journal and other Capital Newspapers holdings definitely are.

JimRomenesko.com, as usual, has the most insider-ish story.

The Wisconsin State Journal has the basic facts presented as favorably as possible.

This is a slow-motion disaster for the working journalists, other newspaper staff, and the people of Madison, Dane County, and southern Wisconsin.

Romney positions explained

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An anonymous commenter at Reddit brilliantly sums up the current state of the Romney campaign:

Vote Romney! He’ll repeal Obamacare, the whole thing, but he’ll keep some parts, like preexisting conditions, but actually he won’t, he’ll keep it but not in the law.

He likes Roe v Wade, but is pro-life, but he won’t pass a law against abortion, but he supports laws against abortion, but not if it’s rape, but only if it’s not secretly not rape. And he’ll nominate pro-life judges, but he won’t ask judges if they’re pro-life before nominating them.

Also he’ll cut taxes on rich people (sorry, “job creators”) and raise taxes by eliminating loopholes, but not loopholes on “job creators”, but also not loopholes on poor people or the middle class, and not loopholes on corporations (who are people (actually let me clarify, they’re not people (except for purposes of campaign contributions))). He’s not going to get into details because if he did his opponents would just use them to attack him.

He’s in favor of a strong dollar, so he’ll stop China from manipulating the currency to maintain a strong dollar, which is causing a big debt, which he’ll make smaller by cutting taxes and cutting spending, except on military, Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare which he’ll spend more on. He’s against cutting Medicaire, because that’s what Obama is doing and he’ll repeal Obama cutting Medicare, but he’ll cut Medicare (sorry, “entitlement reform”), but not Obama’s cutting Medicare different cutting Medicare. And the older generation is running up the deficit at the expense of younger people, which he’ll fix by cutting benefits for younger people (it’s not cutting Medicare, it’s just having Medicare give out less money than before). And he’s in favor of the individual mandate, which is why he’ll repeal it once in office. And he didn’t want to bail out GM, because he secretly did want to bail out GM. But three things he’ll NEVER DO are “apologize for America”, let cancer patients smoke weed, and release his tax returns.

Vote Romney!

Mike was right, but today, we hope, was not a good example

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In commenting on the previous post, Mike writes (in part) about the Wisconsin State Journal

There is no reason to buy this paper or pay the slightest bit of attention to it. With all respect to the many fine people who work there, the WSJ is sinking together with its industry and no one deserves it more richly.

Our first reaction was, jeez, that’s pretty harsh. Isn’t it? We’ve said all along we don’t want to see our city’s sole surviving daily paper disappear.

Sure, that terrible editorial page needs new leadership — or a miracle akin to Saul on the road to Damascus — but we value the news pages, even if they’ve gotten thin. Don’t we? We want working journalists to survive, even to flourish, somehow, across various media, even if newsprint continues to vanish.

So  today we accepted Metcalfe Sentry’s standing offer of a free Sunday State Journal to shoppers spending five bucks. We took it home and read it thoroughly. We must say there was really not much there. By weight, it felt like a Sunday paper. But the stories left us simply unaffected. Read a story; eat a pretzel… both forgotten before we’re done.

There is no reason to accept our judgment. Go look. The top headline features the national election (“It’s On, Wisconsin“). It’s going to be close in Wisconsin; oh boy, various people are quoted saying this and that about the horse race.

Same sort of he said, she said, in the front page article about whether Paul Ryan’s views are in line with Roman Catholic orthodoxy. Again, various quoted people disagree. Surprising? Of course not. The thoughts of the Madison bishop are presumptively worth knowing, because he’s a bishop, but the anecdotal opinions of random Catholic parishioners are honestly of no interest. It’s neither surprising nor useful to read it. It can all be simply presumed in a twinkling.

Even Science reporter Ron Seely disappoints (to a lesser extent) with a Dogs in the Wolf Hunt front-pager.  What do you know; folks disagree, although there is some useful reporting on other states’ wolf hunting. Ron, story idea: Why do 20,000 Wisconsin hunters want to shoot a wolf? That would be an interesting story.

We don’t want to criticize these reporters. These all seem like assignment problems. Once assigned to these particular stories, and given a limited time to write ‘em, this is almost certainly what you get — he said, she said, again. Predictable and uninteresting.

For the moment then, it looks like MIKE WAS RIGHT. Is this really what we’re going to get on a Sunday, the biggest circulation day of the week? It’s really not much.

Wisconsin State Journal again offers only confusion on the debt

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For some strange reason, whenever the State Journal editorializes about the federal debt, it’s almost exactly like Republican spin. Today, of course, was no exception. They’re demanding seriousness from the Dems at their national convention. That would be okay, but we’d rather just see honesty all around.

We don’t think debt is our current number one problem. We actually need more spending to stimulate job growth and demand for business. We should be building and repairing now while borrowing costs are low. We need jobs, jobs, jobs. But let’s put that aside and focus on the debt.

What’s causing the debt? Let’s look again at this graph.

Note first that the graph begins at a low point in 2001. In 2001 we weren’t adding to the debt, because the Clinton years succeeded in balancing the budget.

Then George W. Bush and the Republicans took over. They promptly set us back on the path of more and more debt. Note the orange swath at the top. The Bush-era tax cuts are THE biggest factor driving increasing federal debt, now and in the future.  Really, nearly everything in the graph — tax cuts, wars, the recession, and measures to fight the recession — were Bush-era policies enthusiastically supported by Republicans (yes, including  Paul Ryan).

So the Republicans were merrily — really, merrily — adding to the debt until approximately the day Barack Obama became President. And then, the Republicans turned on a dime and began their public hysterics over debt. Naturally the Wisconsin State Journal editorial board did the same.

Now you might think that a good way to reduce the debt would be to examine what’s causing it and then stop doing that. This would first mean getting rid of the Bush era tax cuts.

Simple? Well, it would be a big start. But as everyone knows, the Republicans won’t have it. They won’t allow it. They can’t. Getting rid of the Bush tax cuts, would be a “tax increase,” and the Republicans are simply intransigent. They’ve signed pledges to Grover Norquist. If they vote for any kind of tax increase, the Club for Growth and a dozen other well-funded groups will fund their opponents in the next Republican primary.

So all kinds of reasonable compromise has been blocked. And we use the word reasonable intentionally. We don’t think you can look at the graph above, and “reasonably” say, “we want to attack the debt, but the Bush-era tax cuts must continue.”

But that’s the Republican message. Serious people should not take it seriously.

Are you listening, WSJ editorial board?

Are we done?

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Labor Day. The Daily Tissue has published for just over a year. We wonder are we done?

This little blogitty thing began more out of annoyance than any rational goal. Our local newspaper was gradually disappearing, and its editorial page was actively alienating its natural, local audience.  That is all still true.

Did we hope that somehow that editorial page would improve? Well, we might have. A little. It seems silly to admit.

Exactly why the majority of staff putting out the Wisconsin State Journal do not walk into a meeting of the editorial board with flaming torches and pitchforks to explain that they want to keep their jobs, and that the miserable work on editorial page makes that less and less likely, and that routine inconsequential drivel may be one thing but the really dumb stuff about important topics has got to cease… why that doesn’t happen is kind of a mystery, but we suppose it has something to do with being a-scared of the boss who — against all odds and evidence — must imagine his editorial page is doing all right.

Maybe that’s the problem. We don’t know. We have no inside information. We just follow along, as readers. Albeit less and less, as there’s less to read.

We realized our comments had gotten all too repetitive when we sat down last week to say something about the State Journal’s discouragingly dishonest editorial on Voter ID. Who is it supposed to fool? It just makes you sigh. The editorial first determines, based on nothing, that it’s no big deal to make it harder for some people to vote, even though Wisconsin Republicans had only “wild claims” to justify their new law. The editorial writers say students and the poor could obtain the newly required — but technically free-of-charge — photo IDs if they just had the “gumption”. (Of course they’d also need time, transportation, and the proper certified proof of citizenship to go along with their unusually strong determination to be a voter, quite possibly for the lesser of two evils.) And finally — out of simply nowhere, of course – the editorial includes the nonsensical and yet always serviceable boilerplate trope ‘Other Party Also to Blame’. The Other Party, it seems, had spoken out against the new law, and that seemed like “playing politics” to the editorial writers. Honest. Read it yourself.

…like those emails from Nigeria

It was laughably poor persuasion, but the thing is — these laughers are fairly routine.

How many times can we make fun of these guys without boring ourselves silly? It’s like warning folks about Nigerian scam emails. After a while, you get tired of saying it, even though the emails keep on coming.

Hollowing out the public dialog

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You walk into a showroom. A salesman walks up. “That’ll be $5.8 trillion,” he says. “How does that sound?”

“How does what sound?”, you say. “I just walked in here!”

The salesman looks aggrieved. “How about something for only $5 trillion. You’d save on that one.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, that would be your total cost.”

“My total cost for what?!”

“Well, your cost for one or the other.”

As you turn on your heel to leave, you hear the salesman calling after you. “If you change your mind, my name is Scott! I’m here six days a wee–”

Was it a dream? A lost episode of Twilight Zone? Could it really have been an editorial (paywall) from the Wisconsin State Journal?

Akin was actually repeating some common knowledge. From the 13th century.

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We did not know this yesterday. Missouri Republican Todd Akin’s ignorance about rape and pregnancy is not uniquely his own. It’s something of a shared belief in extreme anti-abortion circles. Who knew? Blogging at the New York Times, Robert Mackey pulls together various threads involving Akin, Mike Huckabee, Paul Ryan, 13th century belief and law, an undereducated dentist, and a farmer/ophthalmologist whom Mr. Huckabee, as governor, appointed director of the Arkansas Department of Health.

Apparently this whopper goes way back:

Despite constant debunking, this old husbands’ tale has endured for centuries. “The legal position that pregnancy disproved a claim of rape appears to have been instituted in the U.K. sometime in the 13th century,” the medical historian Vanessa Heggie wrote in a blog post for The Guardian on Monday. She explained that one of Britain’s earliest legal texts, written in about 1290, included a clause based on this bit of folk wisdom: “If, however, the woman should have conceived at the time alleged in the appeal, it abates, for without a woman’s consent she could not conceive.”

Ms. Heggie added: “the idea that a women had to orgasm in order to conceive (although not necessarily at exactly the same time as her male partner) was widespread in popular thought and medical literature in the medieval and early modern period. By logical extension, then, if a woman became pregnant, she must have experienced orgasm, and therefore could not have been the victim of an ‘absolute rape.’”

(Apparently, per Akin and Paul Ryan, the current terminology should be “forcible rape” rather than “absolute rape” which sounds, to the modern ear, “archaic”.)

Read the whole post at the NYTimes Myth About Rape and Pregnancy Is Not New (paywall after 20 visits).

Warren Buffett doubles his stake in Lee Enterprises

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The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports good news for Lee Enterprises’ valuation. Warren Buffett now owns about 6% of shares outstanding.

Lee’s shares jumped nearly 20 percent on the news Wednesday, closing at $1.59, up 26 cents.

Lee Enterprises, Inc., headquartered in Davenport, Iowa, owns over 50 newspapers including the Wisconsin State Journal.

LEE stock is way down from $45/share in 2005. However, the Post-Dispatch article includes this as a partial explanation of why Buffett might be buying now:

 …newspapers still turn out operating profits equaling 10 percent or more of revenues, notes long time newspaper industry analyst John Morton. “There are industries that never expect 10 percent margins in the best of times, and newspapers are doing it in their worse times,” he said.

That combination of low stock prices and respectable margins are what attracts Buffett, says Morton. Lee Enterprise’s operating margin is 14 percent, according to a recent SEC filing.

Would Buffett like to own Lee? “It wouldn’t surprise me,” said Morton.