PlanetAlbany

The economics of blogging

This blog, like many others, has found itself taking a break as its author engages in alternative activities such as employment, and work (writing a book) for which he hopes to be paid. Given that decline in production leads to decline in readership,the recent prospects for advertising might not have have appeared promising, but such is apparently not the case.

I was recently contacted by someone "marketing out a site" who proposed paying me at first $20 and then $50 (after I stalled) via PayPal for adding a sentence plus link to this old post about a community college. The idea was I should add this phrase "Taking online courses might help with the commute" to the post, with this link attached to "online courses." The link is to a site for online college courses. When I wrote back raising an objection about blurring the line between editorial and advertising content, the suggestion came back for a "disclaimer" saying "This post has been supported by an outside source." Since I haven't put in the link as suggested, it hasn't been so supported and I'm not expecting any payment. Nor have I any complaints about the approach, being dealt with graciously and professionally. But it does make me wonder is some of the blogs I read are "supported" in this way, and whether that undermines their integrity.

I was contacted separately by a sincere sounding person who wants to write a "guest contribution on your blog" and says:

"I came across the site several weeks ago as I was researching for my most recent publication titled "Veteran Education and Accredited Online Colleges" (at accreditedonlinecolleges.net), which discusses the economic climate for returning GIs and its implications on the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill that promises payment for tuition and living expenses for those who have served in the armed forces. The publication attempts to describe how current vets can take advantage of new mediums in which education is attempting to proliferate today.

"I think a blog post that discusses educational opportunities and incentives for returning GIs could be of some value and interest to your readers. If you're interested, I would love to write a short guest blog post for you that elaborates on this or an even deeper topic you might be keen on. What do you think?

"The resource has been referenced by the Kansas's Office of the Governor's Commission on Disability Concerns, the Navy Club of the United States of America, and Ohio's Green County Veteran's Services, among a few others."

I wonder if this person is expecting to be paid, which, alas, cannot be. Or, like me, does she not fully subscribe to Dr. Johnson's insightful contention that "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money" ? I'll send her this post as a response.

Surveillance much better than stings

I'm glad to see some push-back from Muslims and othersin support of the New York City Police Department's surveillance tactics that seek to prevent terrorist attacks. The NYPD is doing exactly what the FBI and Justice Department should be doing -- instead of conducting sting operations which may have railroaded "a significant number of Muslims who were in fact innocent of any crime," including two in Albany at a trial I covered.

Those two, Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain, are currently serving 15-year sentences in federal prison. The U.S. District Court said it wasn't entrapment, but that's sure what it looked like to me and most of the other reporters who were therein 2006. Aref and Hossain ought to be released immediately in the interest of justice.  And the feds should emulate the NYPD in trying to prevent actual terrorism, instead of inventing plots into which they try to lure innocent people.

Local troops leave for training mission

"New York soldiers to train Afghan army, police", says today's Saratogian. Forty-five National Guard soldiers, some from the Albany area, left Wednesday for a nine-month deployment to Afghanistan "where they will advise and train Afghan National Army and police."

Does anyone think this is a good idea? Does President Obama? Do the three hawkish Republican presidential candidates (Romney, Santorum and Gingrich)? If so, they ought to explain publicly why, since the main threat to our soldiers is currently coming from people they are supposed to be advising and training. There are other ways U.S. money can be used for training at much less risk to our soldiers.

Politicians tend to think in terms of their own political advantage, e.g. "Will x make me -- or him -- look weak?" This issue cries out for nonpolitical, rational, yet urgent reappraisal and consensus.

Two more U.S. soldiers killed by purported allies

These deaths bring to six the number of American soldiers apparently killed by Afghan security forces since the protests over burned Korans began a week or two ago. A switch in strategy along the lines advocated by Fareed Zakaria seems overdue. But the main point has little to do with politics or strategy, yet is as sharp to me -- with two U.S. Army veterans of Afghanistan in the family, both having served two tours, one due to go back soon -- as Occam's Razor: How can we keep deploying our soldiers there as trainers for the Afghan army and police, when the main threat to them now comes precisely from the people they are training? So bring them home, now.

Bring 'em home

After two-plus weeks driving around the eastern United States with my newly retired wife, we found none of our relatives and friends, of widely varied political viewpoints, favoring continuation of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. Recent events appear to prove the main threat to our troops now comes from their purported Afghan allies. It is no comfort to say, as our political and military leaders do, that we will not be deterred from current plans "to shift increasingly away from a lead role in combat in the next year and toward intensified training and advising." Since the main threat comes from the people we are training and advising, against which there is very little realistic defense, that blather is anything but reassuring.

I'm not inclined particularly to blame the Obama administration, whose distractions in places like Libya and Syria have so far proved much less costly than the Bush administration's foray into Iraq. But if our leaders can't make a better case than this for continuing to risk the lives of our sons and daughters, after 10-and-a-half years, then I'll go with Seeger and Springsteen.

Why doesn't TU run Douthat's column? (updated)

The Albany Times Union's opinion department subscribes to The New York Times news service, regularly running its syndicated columnists such as Maureen Dowd and David Brooks. But the TU does not run the Times' Ross Douthat, so you won't read in its pages his Sunday column about "the media's abortion blinders".

Discussing a recent controversy, Douthat writes: "From the nightly news shows to print and online media, the coverage’s tone alternated between wonder and outrage — wonder that anyone could possibly find Planned Parenthood even remotely controversial and outrage that the Komen foundation had 'politicized' the cause of women’s health. ... Conservative complaints about media bias are sometimes overdrawn. But on the abortion issue, the press’s prejudices are often absolute, its biases blatant and its blinders impenetrable."

This seems to me obviously true locally, and a particular problem in the TU editorial department, which strives mightily to obfuscate and deny the possibility of regarding abortion as a legitimately controversial issue. The Times itself has long had similar policies and coverage. For many years, like the TU now, it carried no regular columnist with pro-life opinions. But to the Times' credit, it did hire the pro-life Douthat -- whose views are apparently too dangerous to be read in Albany.

Update: This is not, to be clear, a strictly partisan problem. While pro-life Republicans are obviously beyond the pale, even the Obama administration came in for ferocious criticism in December 2011 when it decided to restrict over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill, and most news reports did not mention legitimate concerns about the pill sometimes acting as an abortifacient. No surprise that today's Catholic-bashing TU column on related issues manages to avoid all mention of abortion.

Media watch

The Times Union has a front-page story today, an expansion and rewrite of the AP, headlined Locals greet Komen reversal, concerning reaction to the announcement by "The Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a breast cancer charity, ... that it will continue to fund breast cancer screenings provided by Planned Parenthood, reversing a decision made earlier this week." Three local sources are quoted, all of them Planned Parenthood supporters. Nobody is allowed to put the contrary view, that Komen would be wise to remove itself from the Planned Parenthood connection because that organization is the biggest abortion provider in America, and a lot of people have reasonable moral objections to abortion.

TU blogger Libby Post links the Komen story to the ongoing controversy over the proposed appointment of Thomas Marcelle as Albany County attorney, which Post has led a campaign to derail because of Marcelle's connection to the socially conservative Alliance Defense Fund. While most of the opposition to Marcelle has come from a gay rights perspective, Post also focuses on abortion: "That’s how the erosion of rights always starts. A little chip here and a little chip there and before you know it, we’re back in 1950, women are in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant and reproductive choice is relegated to the back alley and a hanger."

The TU's news coverage of the Marcelle brouhaha has been more even-handed  than today's Komen story, and the anti-Marcelle editorial was predictable. "We would have preferred that [Albany County Executive Dan] McCoy had picked a county attorney with more progressive views," says the editorial, which is considerably more restrained than Metroland columnist Miriam Axel-Lute. She alleges Marcelle "is in the employ of an organization that is specifically devoted to undermining one of the most important tenets of our Constitution. That is completely and utterly unacceptable." The italics are in the original.

Axel-Lute's point is that the Alliance Defense Fund seeks to undermine the First Amendment, and seeks to impose its views on people by "removing their autonomy over their own bodies and their legal right to equal protection for their families under law." I think the First Amendment claim is hogwash, but it's the latter sentence that is more radical. She is asserting that anyone opposed to the most expansive definitions of abortion and gay rights, e.g. "Marcelle, and any other employee or supporter of the Alliance Defense Fund, is not fit to hold public office in the United States of America." That's also the logic of the less extreme language in the TU editorial, and seems to me much more of a threat to liberty than anything proposed by the Alliance Defense Fund or its allies.

Fix is in at TU

Today's lead opinion column on the editorial page of The Times Union is by James Featherstonhaugh, identified only as "an Albany lawyer." I guess everyone is supposed to know the guy is a wired lobbyist-fixer currently representing harness race tracks as president of the New York Gaming Association.

One is not astonished to find Featherstonhaugh's position: "Allowing table games to be deployed at the nine racetrack casinos" would be just hunky-dory. As he public-spiritedly opines, "Enhanced gaming should be executed by trusted partners in known locations without disruption. Let's join the governor and the state legislative leaders and make the New York way even better."
Every day in every way things just get better and better.

Secret ethics

Doesn't sound like I missed much at the second meeting of the new state ethics commission. Why would anyone show up to see a bunch of political insiders, mostly lawyers, who are apparently determined to do their business in secret and thus cannot be held accountable?

A different kind of Republican

Freshman GOP Rep. Chris Gibson says "I'm underwhelmed, I'm disappointed" by the Republican presidential candidates, though he knows he will "hold my nose" and vote for the party's nominee in November. Speaking this week at a meeting of the Tea Party-flavored "New York 20th District Advocates" at DiDonna's restaurant on the south shore of Saratoga Lake, Gibson said most of the candidates "just sign up for the empire," meaning they support an aggressive foreign policy empowering the president to make war and continuing to fund U.S. bases all over the world. The only candidate who does not support that model is Ron Paul, whom Gibson mentioned sympathetically in another context; but he didn't endorse him, either, and part of the discussion focused on Gibson's defense of his recent vote for a defense bill which authorized detention of non-U.S. citizens -- a bill which Paul opposed. Like Paul, Gibson opposes the Patriot Act, regarding it as unconstitutional. He said he supports President Obama's policies on Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gibson noted he has not been a party-line vote in Washington, bucking his leadership to pass an amendment continuing to fund a rural broadband loan program, and, most recently, being one of only seven Republicans to favor continuation of a payroll tax cut. His colleagues swiftly came around on the latter issue and passed a two-month tax-cut extension, which Gibson said he wants continued until comprehensive "pro-growth tax reform" is passed. On the recent flap about Obama's recess appointments Gibson was critical both of the president and congressional Republicans, and said in an era of divided government the parties need to work together more. He even defended the existence of the National Labor Relations Board (although not its appointments and actions under Obama) as a check on corporate power, and said the tax code needs to be reformed so that it no longer favors big business over small.