Three Cures for Ailing Newspapers “I feel I’m being catapulted into another world, a world I don’t really understand,” Denis Finley told the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Finley, editor of the Virginian-Pilot, isn’t the only newspaper executive who can’t come up with a plan for the future. “Only 5 percent of [newspaper editors and publishers],” finds Pew’s latest analysis of the nation’s 1217 daily newspapers, “said they were very confident of their ability to predict what their newsrooms would look like five years from now.” Newspapers are in trouble. More people read them than ever, but most of them read them online, for free. Unfortunately online advertising rates are too low to make up for declining print circulation. A reader of The New York Times‘ print edition generates about 170 times as much revenue as someone who surfs NYTimes.com. (This is because print readers spend 47 minutes with the paper. Online browsers visit the paper’s website…

Bickering Over Terminology Delays Real Action There’s a debate in the media about the recession. On the right are those who say that the economy has never been better. Not so fast, says the official left: we’ve (just) started a recession. Phil Gramm, McCain’s former economic advisor, leads the School of Sunny Optimism. “This is a mental recession,” said Gramm. “We may have a recession, we haven’t had one yet. We have sort of become a nation of whiners.” Given his day job, you have to admire his attitude. UBS Investment Bank, which employs Gramm as its vice chairman, was recently forced to write off $38 billion in bad debts because of its exposure to the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, wiping out all its profits since 2004. Economists are mildly pessimistic. In April, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke conceded that a recession was possible. Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group, believes that unemployment and other data for the first…

Nothing Honorable About the Vietnam War Every presidential candidacy relies on a myth. Reagan was a great communicator; Clinton felt your pain. Both storylines were ridiculous. But rarely are the constructs used to market a party nominee as transparent or as fictional as those we’re being asked to swallow in 2008. On the left–OK, not–we have Barack Obama. “The best orator of his generation!” says Ed Rendell, the Democratic power broker who has a day job as governor of Pennsylvania. “The best orator since Cicero!” Republican strategist Mary Matalin swoons. No doubt, Obama reads a mean speech. Take his Teleprompter away, though, and the dude is as lost as George Bush at a semiotics class. Forced to answer reporters’ questions off the cuff, Obama is so afraid of messing up that he…carefully…spaces…each…word…apart…so…he…can…see…them…coming…wayyy…in…advance. Still more laughable than the notion of Obama as the second coming of JFK is the founding myth of the McCain campaign: (a) he is a war hero,…

The Triumph of Faith-Based Politics I believe in John McCain. Which is why I don’t believe him. When John McCain said he wanted to stay in Iraq 100 years, he didn’t mean it. He just said it to get elected. His claims that the war is going great? Voting time after time to send hundreds of billions of dollars to fund the war without asking for a timetable for withdrawal? All part of his masterful plan to fool right-wing hicks into voting for him. Once he gets the keys to 1600 Penn, the real, antiwar McCain will reveal his true plan: Evacuation from Iraq within 24 hours. An apology to the United Nations. Bush put on trial for war crimes. Mandatory gay marriage. He’s got a similar plan for FISA. True, he voted to allow the president to eavesdrop on Americans’ phone calls and e-mails. He gave the phone companies immunity for the years that they spied on us illegally.…

One Amendment from Column A, Another from Column B A week ago, Justice Anthony Kennedy was a liberal hero. Joining the court’s four liberal jurists, he declared that while 9/11 may have changed everything, it didn’t change the constitution. Despite statements by the Bush Administration to the contrary, Guantánamo is not a legal no-man’s land. POWs being held at America’s Devil’s Island now have the right to challenge their detention in federal courts. “Thank God,” an editorial cartoonist friend told me after Kennedy cast the deciding vote in a 5-4 decision restoring habeas corpus. “We were one vote away from fascism.” Antonin Scalia’s dissent–“[granting Guantánamo detainees the right to a fair trial] will almost certainly cause more Americans to get killed”–was widely ridiculed as baseless and hysterical. What a difference a week–and your politics–make. Then Kennedy cast the swing vote in another major decision. Declaring Washington D.C.’s handgun ban unconstitutional, he accepted the NRA’s argument that the Second Amendment’s reference…

Vital Businesses Need Nationalization The gas station attendant came outside. Wow, I thought, full serve! Ignoring me, she flung a magnetic price decal on top of the price per gallon. Regular unleaded had gone up 20 cents in the time it took me to drive from the curb to the pump. “You’re kidding me,” I moaned. “It’s 3 o’clock,” she shrugged. “Just got the new price.” There has to be a better way, I thought. And there is. It isn’t drilling in the Alaskan wilderness. It sure isn’t John McCain’s plan to offer $300 million to the first person to come up with a longer-lasting car battery Gas prices could hit $7 a gallon before long, Wall Street analysts say, but Americans–always optimists!–take a little comfort in the fact that Europeans have paid more than that for years. But a lot of foreigners are laughing at us even harder than we’re laughing at the Euros. Did you know that Venezuelans…

Vital Businesses Need Nationalization The gas station attendant came outside. Wow, I thought, full serve! Ignoring me, she flung a magnetic price decal on top of the price per gallon. Regular unleaded had gone up 20 cents in the time it took me to drive from the curb to the pump. “You’re kidding me,” I moaned. “It’s 3 o’clock,” she shrugged. “Just got the new price.” There has to be a better way, I thought. And there is. It isn’t drilling in the Alaskan wilderness. It sure isn’t John McCain’s plan to offer $300 million to the first person to come up with a longer-lasting car battery. Gas prices could hit $7 a gallon before long, Wall Street analysts say, but Americans–always optimists!–take a little comfort in the fact that Europeans have paid more than that for years. But a lot of foreigners are laughing at us even harder than we’re laughing at the Euros. Did you know that Venezuelans…

The System Works? Not Really Tens of thousands of innocent detainees have passed through Guantánamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Diego Garcia and other U.S. torture facilities. Thousands remain “disappeared,” possibly murdered. Some may be on one of the Navy vessels recently revealed to have been repurposed as prison ships. Dozens have been beaten to death or killed by willful medical neglect. For seven years, the Bush Administration, the Democratic Congress and its media allies have denied “unlawful enemy combatants” (or, as Dick Cheney called them, “the worst of the worst” terrorists) the right to habeas corpus, the centuries-old right of persons arrested by the police to face their accusers and the evidence against them in a court of law. Thanks to a 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court, America’s latest flirtation with fascism is coming to an end. Parts of the infamous Military Commissions Act of 2006 that eliminated habeas corpus have been declared unconstitutional. Prisoners at Guantánamo and possibly other…

The U.S. Has Rivals and Competitors, Not Enemies “A Gallup poll,” Libby Quaid wrote for the Associated Press on June 2nd, “found that two-thirds of [Americans] said they believe it would be a good idea for the president to meet with the leaders of enemy countries.” Who are they referring to? An enemy is a country with whom a nation is at war. “Enemy countries”? We have enemies (hi, Osama). We have critics. We even have competitors. But the United States doesn’t have enemy countries. September 11 aside, citizens of the United States should feel secure. We border big oceans and two close allies–more like wholly owned subsidiaries. As for the rest of the world, well, they’ve been pretty nice to us. Not that we deserve it. Since 1941, the U.S. has attacked, among others, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia, Laos, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Grenada, Panama, the Philippines, Libya, Iran, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Haiti, Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq. Not…