My Wingfield Something Something

Have you heard? There's a new kid in town. His name is Kyle Wingfield. He's Wooten's replacement and he's put me into a terrible dilemma. He's reasonable and doesn't provide me much ammunition. Also, I can't think of a clever name for a series about him.

Until today.

I have one firm rule in life. If you tell me you believe the Earth is 6,000 years old, I will stop listening to you as I will assume anything which comes next will be just as insane.

I have a more flexible rule regarding logical fallacies - if you use them frequently, I'll probably stop listening to you. I need flexibility on this one because if it were applied rigidly, I'd have to stop paying attention to politics.

Kyle Wingfield tackles Cap and Trade today and shockingly, I agree with most of his points.

Cap and Trade is a Rube Goldberg affair which likely won't accomplish its goal - can't disagree there.

It will likely be used for nefarious gain by greedy politicians - if it can be leveraged, a politician will grab the nearest lever.

A straight carbon tax would be fairer - A conservative calling for a tax? Both shocking and correct.

Unfortunately, to get to these meaty and worthy topics, you have to traverse the following:

One does not have to doubt, as I do, claims that the complex science of the Earth’s climate is “settled” to see that this bill is a sham.

Well, hello Mr. Strawman wrapped in a cloak of incredulity.

Climate science is certainly not settled and no one claims it is. What has been described in layman's terms as "settled" is the overwhelming evidence that man is impacting the climate in an adverse manner.

And that leads us to the argument of incredulity. It's a personal favorite since it is so frequently used by creationists. The simple version is someone states something is so complex it can never be understood therefore any conclusions must be wrong.

Life is so diverse, therefore we can never understand it, so evolution cannot possibly explain it. The weather, atmosphere or whatever trope of the month is used to describe climatology is so complicated, climate scientists could never explain its actions.

Any scientist, if he or she didn't immediately apply my 6,000 year old rule, would reply, of course it is complex but that does not mean we cannot understand it nor should we stop trying.

Kyle, your writing reminds me of the old Jim I so frequently miss. It is well reasoned, worthy of conversation and certainly on the track of "common sense conservatism".

It would be a shame if so early in your run you decide fast fallacy is necessary to amplify steady reason.

Now about that name...maybe something with Winging in the title?

My Morning Wooten

The cat gets cattier as the cat approaches the end.

It’s fair enough for Presidents to hold Town Hall meetings and to pretend that he’s taking questions from something other than an infomercial audience. But it is phony, the stuff of campaign commercials. The White House press corps is right to challenge the pretense that a legitimate give-and-take represented as a news event is being held when it’s a sham.

I don't know which is more shocking.

The revelation that Presidents actually stage events in order to promote their agenda (why am I having a flashback to a fighter jet, a flight suit and a big ass banner?)

Or

That Jim just complimented the liberal media White House press corps.

The Cognitive Dissonance Of Erick Erickson

Two Peach Pundit headlines posted within minutes of each other.

ATL Growing (subhead: Good for Georgia)

then

Taxing People Out Of Atlanta

It appears Erick is having a hard time tracking his own cheap shots.

2009 Reflected In 1938

A common theme in politics is it has never been this bad before. This whine is always followed by someone countering with tales of Grover Cleveland's "bastard" child or Andrew Jackson's wife being called a "bigamist whore".

The current turmoil in journalism seems to have a similar tale to tell. Listening to the extremists, one might think a sudden vacuum in professional news is bringing the Republic to its knees.

Jack Shafer of Slate counters that we have indeed heard this all before. But he turns the argument on its head by arguing that we are actually entering a golden age of journalism.

What Sullivan got absolutely right in 1938 is that technology, culture, business, and audience tastes are always in flux, making it the job of writers young and old to grab the best available tools and get to the business of chronicling the world. If Sullivan were alive today, I'll bet he'd be encouraging journalists to study PHP and Javascript, to hone their video-cutting skills, and to learn how to manipulate databases. The cheap tools and affordable devices the average Joe has at his disposal to produce precision journalism and distribute it around the world are enough to make the reporters of yesterday sob in envy. It's the difference between digging ditches with a spade and excavating a canal with dynamite.

A loyal reader pointed me to this article and particularly the penultimate paragraph (which is not the one I quote above) but instead of reprinting that one as well, I encourage you to read the entire piece.

From fire to the printing press to the automobile to the iPhone, technology is always the great cultural motivator. We have arrived at one of those great divergences where technology is fundamentally changing institutions considered most sacred. It is time to make the hard choice - embrace the inevitable change or allow the inertia of lamentations to paralyze.

Those Darned Liberals!

Always promoting their left-wing agenda!

That decision, in Ricci v. DeStefano, was eminently reasonable. You don’t change the score after the game is over.

Whoops!

Just want this benchmark for the next time some ninny starts screaming about crazy, communist Cynthia Tucker..

Housekeeping

I'm doing some housekeeping around the joint so don't get frightened if things get weird.

One item that I've needed to address for a while was the Georgia Voices feed over to your right. It's not only working again but it's updated to include some new joints you may have missed. Be sure to scan the latest headlines and show them some love.

As usual, if you've got a joint that I've missed and you think it should be listed, shoot me an email or leave a comment.

UPDATE: I know you're seeing some weird margin things. I've discovered a bug in AdSense and am having a helluva time sorting it out. I don't really care about AdSense but once I start gnawing a bone, I have a hard time letting go.

Tip Of The Spear, Part II

Parking deck at Georgia Tech's Centergy Center collapses.

Also follow on Twitter.

Talking And Not Listening

Last Friday, Urbanreporter kindly invited me to yet another 'journalists discussing how do we do new media' bull session.

Gathered in the studios of Public Broadcasting of Atlanta were the usual suspects.

I've been asked a couple of times if there would be a recap. My instincts were to write "sad and infuriating" and nothing more.

Sad to hear such talented writers talk of leaving their industry to survive. Infuriating for reasons which will shortly become clear.

But a few more words are needed. There were a few points which I believe crystalize the problem.

After 20 minutes of the same laments heard over and over for the past year, a new voice piped up. The one poor, lone ad man to attend any of these meetings, spoke. One of the journalists cried "this is the guy we should be listening to!"

In the room were a successful entrepeneur, one of the guys behind CNN's wildly successful iReport and a certain gentleman with 9 years in the IT business who has been writing online for over three years.

Yet, the ad guy was who they believed could provide them with the key to their dreams.

One other new thing emerged.

A casual comment from a few days before made me aware of "Like The Dew". Haven't heard of it? I can't imagine why.

Like The Dew was described as a labor of love. Well, it better be a labor of love if nobody knows about it.

There are many things we could discuss about that web site, but I'd like you to focus on just one. Look at their "Southern Links" section. Now look at my "Georgia Voices" section to your left. Compare and contrast.

We are past the "they're just not getting it" stage. We are into willful ignorance.

And one more thing. When that entrepeneur started listing off resources which could help the journalists understand this online world (i.e. Social Media Club), they desperately inquired how do they find such wonders.

People who spent decades tracking down corrupt scoundrels, poring over mind-numbing public records and digging through dozens of leads were stumped when it came to signing up on twitter and finding and following smcatl.

How do you help that?

Saturday Stupids

In the village of the stupids, everyone is the idiot.

My Morning Wooten

Here we go. And we've got some real doozies today.

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor resigns from an exclusive all-women’s club after some grumpy men raised questions about whether the membership’s appropriate for a Supreme Court justice. Her explanation, once commonplace among members of clubs that excluded minorities, was that to her knowledge no man had applied. And had any man meeting qualifications been at the club’s mobile admissions office in Hahira, Ga., at 2:16 a.m. on Dec. 25, 2006, when it was accepting applications from males, he would surely have been allowed in.

What was also commonplace of members of clubs that excluded minorities was when confronted, they'd roll on the floor, red-faced, screaming about rights of association, government interfering in private entities and tradition - until they faced the political reality that they would lose and then wiped their snot covered faces and muttered, 'okay'. Bottom line is it is just twisting the Jims of the world into knots that the Sotomayor nomination is going to breeze through confirmation with barely a blip.

Voting, ACORN and Georgia graveyard style, in Iran: The number of votes in 50 cities exceeded the number of eligibles by 3 million. And while Fulton County is notorious for being unable to count ballots in a timely fashion, Iran counted 40 million paper ballots and report results within two hours of polls closing. By the way, President Barack Obama’s still searching for just the right soothing words to convince the Iranian regime to stop being mean. So far, no success — a real surprise.

Will there be a point where ACORN jokes become stale and tired? Can we arrive there sooner rather than later? If certain 'so called conservatives' continue to spin myths of ACORN spawning massive election fraud, then I will relegate them to the same niche as loon liberals who tell me they know where the stolen ballot boxes from the 2004 election are kept - meaning the only attention they deserve is a pat on their soft head.

After the collapse of the financial and banking industry, brought about by gimmicks like no-doc mortgages (no income or asset verification), red flags now go up when reading sentences such as these: “MARTA staff found the money to keep the last hour of rail service and the three bus sets by making an accounting change with the money they set aside for retirees’ medical benefits. By putting the money in a restricted account, [CEO Beverly] Scott said, MARTA can put aside less money without affecting money that eventually goes to the retirees.” If it ain’t real money, it ain’t real money — no matter which column you put numbers in.

I find it funny that certain people who have done nothing but craft words all their life will decry certain politician's lack of real world experience and then take their own ham-fists to the voodoo that is modern accounting. Then again - my humor threshold is pretty low.

What Were They Thinking? Contest: Winner, Mark Sanford. First runner-up, the mama and wife of a Cobb man accused of taking a 12-year-old to a motel for sex, a statutory rape offense, are arrested for allegedly intervening with the victim on his behalf.

I propose an honorable mention for What Were They Thinking: Jim Wooten for his knee-jerk defense of Mark Sanford and excoriation of his own colleagues. Strange that we hear not a peep from Jim on how his thesis fell apart in less then 24 hours. Jason Pye, who I also mentioned in that edition of My Morning Wooten, showed the grace of true accountability by publicly admitting he had been fooled. Wooten on the other hand seems to follow the "so called conservative" mantra of "I'm right no matter what".

Crowds headed to a Braves game and a soccer match between Mexico and Venezuela at the Georgia Dome clogged the always-trouble Downtown Connector for miles up I-75, I-85 and Ga. 400. Fix it. Find a private-sector company to double-deck the Downtown Connector. Make both toll roads.

When a co-worker (usually from sales) makes an absurd proposal, my typical response is "sorry, my magic wand is broken today". Putting aside for the moment that Jim's only solution for transportation issues is more pavement, note how the private sector magic wand is used. Somehow, the pixie dust of no government involvement will allow a 27 mile long, multi-lane, double-decker highway, through a major downtown corridor to be built so quickly and efficiently, the population will hardly notice. And once the monster is complete, we will be so overwhelmed with gratitude, we will gladly lay hosannahs at every toll booth along the way.

And people think I'm stoned.

Good lord. Let's just move on to the weekend as quickly as possible.

Selah.