A bit of housekeeping: Since the most recent LBFriday installment was three days late and wound up getting derailed by a long Aristotelian tangent about acting, ethics and Mike Seaver, I intend to revisit Part 3 of LBTM tomorrow.
From what I've seen of the comments thread in the previous entry, many of you have already begun responding to that part of the movie. I'll try to catch up with you tomorrow.
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Here's a bit more from Jim Hopkins' Gannett blog linked to in the previous post: "Documents reveal double-digit profit margins at scores of papers now on verge of massive layoffs."
Hopkins got his hands on a Cost & Statistical Summary report for the chain covering the first three quarters of 2007. As he says:
The Green Bay Press-Gazette was the star. It had the single-highest profit margin: 42.5%. … The paper's total ad revenue over the three quarters: $25 million. The report doesn't disclose circulation revenue for any paper. Applied only to ad revenue, then, Green Bay made around $10.6 million during the period. …
Now, some readers say these are, in fact, gross profit margins — that certain costs must still be subtracted before you can get to "net" earnings. … To be sure, several barely profitable papers may have dipped into the red since this report was published. The economy went over a cliff this year when the housing bubble collapsed, throwing the nation into recession. Yet, I imagine many of the papers listed below are still enjoying very healthy margins.
For the record, the Green Bay Press-Gazette, which reported that 42.5% gross profit margin for the first 9 months of 2007, laid off 14 people this week, eliminating a total of 22 jobs.
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It's Thursday, let's talk about abortion!
On his way out the door, President Bush is tossing a bomb over his shoulder:
Abortion and birth control opponents are praising the new rule — and praising Bush for enacting it. I don't understand why.
This isn't a piece of legislation that had to be patiently shepherded through Congress. Nor is it a court ruling that took years to work its way through the judiciary. This is an executive rule — something Bush could have done just as easily at any point during the previous eight years of his administration.
The fact that Bush waited eight years to do this — doing it just in time to make it a pain for Barack Obama to reverse, but still in such a way that it is guaranteed to be reversed soon enough — is evidence not just that Bush takes his anti-abortion supporters for granted and for suckers, but that he doesn't care that they know this.
Think of it this way, as soon as Obama is sworn in he will have the authority to issue an executive order ruling that the EPA must regulate CO2 as a pollutant the way they're supposed to have been doing all along. This is something Obama has said throughout his campaign that he supports and it's something his environmentalist supporters expect him to follow through on — just like Bush's support for an expansive "conscience" rule was something he campaigned on (twice) and that his anti-abortion supporters ought to have expected him to follow through on sometime before his last full month in office. Now, if Obama were to dither for the next four years without ever issuing an executive order on CO2, and then if he were to get re-elected in 2012 promising to do this in his second term, and then he were to fiddle around for another four years before finally, just before leaving office, getting around to issuing the order he could have issued eight years earlier and doing so in such a way that it would likely be overturned by his successor … if Obama were to do that then you can be sure that environmental voters would not be praising him for it. Environmental voters would interpret such hypothetical shoddy treatment as evidence that this hypothetically irresponsible president didn't really give a rip about them or their agenda.
Seriously, shouldn't supporters of this conscience rule be at least a little miffed that their agenda has been reduced to a soon-to-be-erased afterthought? Or is it that they're just as cynically manipulative as Bush seems to be and they're only applauding this because they've already written the fundraising letters they intend to send out when President Obama predictably reverses this early next year?
"Conscience" doesn't really seem to be a factor in these folks' political games. They often seem less like they have an agenda they want to enact than like they have a racket they intend to milk.
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OK, I knew the Fourth Amendment was looking shaky and the Eighth Amendment was on life support, but I didn't really expect to have to worry about the Pentagon violating the Third Amendment.
The U.S. military, so far, doesn't seem to be planning to quarter these troops in private homes, but according to The Washington Post:
The long-planned shift in the Defense Department's role in homeland security was recently backed with funding and troop commitments after years of prodding by Congress and outside experts, defense analysts said.
There are critics of the change, in the military and among civil liberties groups and libertarians who express concern that the new homeland emphasis threatens to strain the military and possibly undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, a 130-year-old federal law restricting the military's role in domestic law enforcement.
But the Bush administration and some in Congress have pushed for a heightened homeland military role since the middle of this decade, saying the greatest domestic threat is terrorists exploiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. …
[The troops] would be trained to respond to a domestic chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-yield explosive attack, or CBRNE event, as the military calls it.
I'm not sure which is more disturbing — that it now takes a fifth of the letters in the alphabet to designate the various possible nightmare scenarios, or the fact that our government imagines that the best and first response to such scenarios should involve uniformed, armed soldiers.
Responding to the aftermath of an explosion is not significantly different from responding to the aftermath of an earthquake. If your city gets hit by an earthquake, you'll need help and you'll need it fast, but a few thousand soldiers with guns wouldn't really
be your first priority.
Similarly, responding to
a chemical weapon attack is not significantly different from responding to the aftermath of an industrial chemical release or spill. Think of Bhopal. It's just deeply weird to consider an incident like that and think that flooding the area with armed soldiers would have been the most useful priority in response.
The threat of a "CBRNE event" is a serious concern, but precisely because it is serious it requires a more serious response than this. If the federal government wanted to train a 20,000-member incident response team of EMTs, firefighters, medical and rescue personnel then I would happily applaud. But I'd want that army of first-responders to be operating under civilian or law-enforcement authority.
Otherwise, this sounds like a hair-trigger excuse for Martial Law. No, thank you.
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