Ah, timing. Sweet motherf****** timing. Things have heated up, gotten really interesting. Electric City Weblog fell for a bit of sophistry, and Natelson is doing his usual “I’m right, I’ve always been right, and here’s an example to prove it” highly exclusionary reasoning, and over at Left in the West they are having an orgy over the crumbs being thrown out by Congress using the name they stole from a broad public benefit we once called a “public option”.
And my modem crashes. Qwest will supply a new once, I suppose, but I think I have to pay for it, and I’m sure someone has better ones for less money, so I’ll go find one today. In the meantime, I’m in a coffee shop, and soon they will tell me to move along, make room for paying customers.
Here’s an interesting comment buried way down below that popped up this morning, from Rick Meis of Montanans for Single Payer. I had written with some amazement that the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, in paragraph 48 of a piece on health care reform (July of 2009) had actually allowed some criticism of Max Baucus to seep through. The Montana press has for years been his bitch, and is again, apparently.
Here’s Meis:
Interestingly, the reporter who wrote the article was new to the Chronicle, and she is already gone. They don’t print anything that does not support the industry view except letters. None of our press releases have been picked up or our calls returned. Yellow journalism is old school; where’s-the-green journalism is now.
The writer was Gail Schontzler, and I don’t know what happened to her – maybe greener pastures. Maybe she’s really good and got a better job. More likely she was really good and had to find another way to make a living. Reporters who are confrontational, who do real journalism in the old sense (“find out what powerful people are doing and report back to us”), generally don’t last in journalism.
But I don’t know. I Googled her name and didn’t get anything beyond her tenure at the Chronicle. Maybe she is still there and is still hammering away at power. But I doubt it.
Piece of Mindful 