Taking a bite out of the media landscape

OK, people, we're breaking some news tonight on the ol' blog.

Tribune seems to have moved quite quickly after the recent misfortune of its chief innovation officer, Lee Abrams. New to the post at Tribune Tower in Chicago is Scout the Dog, who did some thing or another for Revolution 21 in Omaha, Neb.

Scout wasted no time chasing his tail, and his paws hit the ground running in the Windy City. And we've obtained -- exclusively -- his first memo sent to all Tribune hands (and paws) this evening:

From: Scout the Dog
Date: 10/13/2010 20:32:37
To: Tribune Co.
Subject: WEDNESDAY EVENING WONDERING


IT Seems to me that we have to be much more relational with our mediaconsimer base, as we endeaver to AFDI in building a new-media paradime.

Why is it that we only target our media products (and they are producks, we seek to exchange media info and coolness for the consumers media dollars) at such a small smattering of our potensul audience? In this we are being elitist, and elitist aint gonna cut it in the new media age when you can learn everything you need to know on in the Twitter scape? This is whacko -- hello?!?!?!? -- people, and if you can't get out of the way of the Future, then it is gonna run you over like The Bad Car when you miss his tyre by just a little bit(e).

I've seen what happens when you get run over by The Bad Car, which is the revolutionary future, and you don't want to be the rodekilled, believe me. Lead the revolutionshary foreces and AFDI re: the Future New Paradime, or get the HELL OUT OF THE WAY!!!

SQUIRREL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So what Im proposing we actualkly start actually AFDI RIGHT NOW is aiming more content toward our canine readers and viewers. THSI IS AN ENTIRE MASSIVE UNDRSEVRED MARKET HERE!!! AND WE AR LEEVING DOLLARES ON THE TABLE BY NOT REACHING OUT TO FIDO. OR REX.

I know this subjecct intematntely. Somone with the name of Scout should.

I'm seeying a show on WGN AMERica called Who Let the Dogs Out? -- WOOF! -- and it would start with an actual f***ing stampede of dogs running straight at the camera barking and barking, and then we do a quick cut to picturees of bitches in Heat (uh oh . . . I hope I dont get in troubble like Lee Abrams . . . HAHA) and then we have the exercize segment where we put up pictures of cats and we all run and run and run and try to jump through the TV screen to get the.m

That would be an excellent cardio workout -- can we get federal heath-grqant money to partially fund the production of this. AFDI! Lets' get on it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And the we could introduce variety into this daily segment by substituting other prey for the very pedestrian feline scumsuckers. I'm thinking right noiw

SQUIRREL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

about rabbytes and other bad interlopers we find in our yards when Master lets us out!

We can make this happens ASAP if we just AFDI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm also envissionying making our daily news[papers more canine freindlee as part of our antielitist agenda this quarter. We all don't actually read the newspaper but we all can use the newspaper, and printing helpful targets on it for the young paper-trainers. This especially would start targeting our struggling newspaper business toward a much-needed younger demographic -- we have to start growing that demo people!

We can't rely on old humans forever if our properties like the Chicago Tribune are still going to be around in 2020. Dogs! Are! The! Future! AFDI! Make it so!

SQUIRREL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is onlyt a very very small part of the innovation that needs to be happening in the Tribune orgianization. We need to be forward thinking, outside the box thinking and antielitist thinking to achieve our goals for future growth and to once again lead the media world as we put our minds toward AFDI!!!!!!!

I will continnue this theme in next week's Wednesday Evening Wondering as we explore the concept --- and I think this will be a real winner -- of Dog Whistle Radio for our FM stations!!!

Now go out and

SQUIRREL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

just AFDI.

Or else, a-holes!

Friends don't let friends E-mail that

Once upon a time, Lee Abrams could program some mean radio.

Unfortunately, radio is finished. And so, it would seem, is Lee Abrams.

Lee's undoing was in trying to operate at a great big media company just like he would at Z-Rock. In 1976. Which is ironic, because Abrams' whole spiel at Tribune Co., and at XM satellite radio before that, was how everything had changed, it's a revolution out there, and you could either change or suffer the consequences.

Then Abrams, Trib's "chief innovation officer," goes and sends a Z-Rock memo -- circa Cheech and Chong and including links to some Not Safe for Work videos from The Onion -- to the whole company. Including the Chicago Tribune. With predictable results, as reported by the Tribune itself:

Lee Abrams, Tribune Co.’s chief innovation officer, has been placed on indefinite suspension without pay pending review of a company-wide memo he sent to staff Monday that spurred a rash of employee complaints.

Abrams apologized Tuesday “to everyone who was offended” by the e-mail that included a link to a video labeled “Sluts” that included female nudity. The incident followed by less than a week a New York Times front-page story that characterized Tribune Co. management as fostering a sexist “frat house” atmosphere.

“Lee recognizes that the video was in extremely bad taste and that it offended employees,” Tribune Chief Executive Randy Michaels said in the memo announcing the suspension. “But, this is the kind of serious mistake that can’t be tolerated; we intend to address it promptly and forcefully.”

Abrams may still face additional disciplinary action, Michaels said.

“As I said last week, a creative culture must be built on a foundation of respect,” Michaels said, referring to an Oct. 5 note sent to employees ahead of the New York Times piece. “Our culture is not about being offensive or hurtful. We encourage employees to speak up when they see or hear something that they find offensive, as a number of employees did with regard to this particular e-mail. I can assure you, you will be heard.

YOU WANT to know why some videos are called "Not Safe for Work"? It's because they're NOT SAFE FOR WORK. Included under NSFW are videos, no matter how pointedly satirical, that include a woman pouring booze over her bare breasts and an "anchor" saying “stay safe out there, and don’t f*** any of those sluts.”

Longtime Chicago media writer Robert Feder has to be soooooooo enjoying this:

Tuesday’s antics were sparked by a typically idiotic company-wide memo written the day before by Lee Abrams, chief innovation officer of Tribune Co. (and longtime crony of CEO Randy “Show Me Your Breasts” Michaels). Although it contained links to some videos that any normal person would consider outrageously inappropriate for the workplace — including one in which women identified as “sluts” were seen simulating lewd acts — Abrams’ memo was not much different than dozens of others he’d written since 2008.

But before the day was over, Abrams was forced to apologize publicly for what he called “poor judgment,” and ordered his offensive email deleted from company servers. What made this particular “think piece” from Abrams such a cause célèbre? Three things:

* Chicago Tribune editor Gerry Kern chose to make an issue of it, lodging complaints to the company’s human resources department and to Abrams directly, and then publicly declaring: “I thought it was offensive and I thought it was completely inappropriate to be sent out in a workplace setting to everyone in this company.”

* Tribune media columnist Phil Rosenthal broke the story of the controversial memo and of Kern’s reaction to it, further distancing the newspaper’s editorial department from the corporate suites of Tribune Tower. Embarrassing as it was, it also inoculated the paper from even greater embarrassment if the memo had been leaked elsewhere.

* Most significantly, it came just six days after a scathing, front-page story in The New York Times exposed the “bankrupt culture” of Tribune Co. under the ownership of Sam Zell and the leadership of Michaels and his cadre of radio rowdies, including Abrams. Reporter David Carr revealed in vivid detail what company employees (and, to a great extent, readers of this blog) had known for quite awhile — that the Tower had become a playground for management’s adolescent fantasies and a cesspool of “sexual innuendo, poisonous workplace banter and profane invective.”

JUST A BIT AGO, I said Lee Abrams' undoing was trying to roll like he was at Z-Rock three-and-a-half decades ago. Actually, that was just one part of his undoing, and perhaps not the most significant.

A key part of his undoing was not believing in editing. Of any sort.

He spent his Tribune tenure spitballing ideas. Normally, this is good. But when every wet wad of random thought you're trying to stick to the wall begins its life cycle as a stream-of-consciousness, typo-riddled E-mail you send to the whole bloody company, you're going to get a reputation for being flaky.

People are going to stop taking you seriously. Not that Trib people ever took Abrams seriously in the first place, being that he came to a company built largely upon journalism from a gig as "chief creative officer" for a satellite-radio company. And before that, from creating radio formats like . . . Z-Rock, or whatever.

Traditional media is in a pickle these days. Incumbent upon any "chief innovation officer" trying to earn enough trust to actually begin innovating is, above all, not sounding like you took the pickle jar and turned it into a bong.

Or, as the Tribune-owned Baltimore Sun's tech reporter and blogger tweeted just after the news of Abrams' suspension broke:

Goodness.. spontaneous applause just broke out in the Sun newsroom on the news that Tribune's chief innovation officer was suspended.

OR . . . as one Tribune refugee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning ex-Los Angeles Times columnist Dan Neil told Forbes today:

“No one could ever figure out what those Monday morning missives meant,” Neil told me today, referring to the “Think Pieces” Abrams regularly issued, the final one of which proved his undoing. “And all I can say is that at least one of them finally had a positive effect.”

“Abrams was supposed to be some sort of morale officer raising the spirits of the troops and rallying them to the cause, but the effects of his Monday morning missives was precisely the opposite,” he continued. “There was nothing more demoralizing than getting one of these badly written, garbled stoner notes and knowing that this guy was at the top of the organization you worked for.”

EXACTLY. Abrams was a dead man "innovating" long before he sent that highly ill-timed paean to inappropriateness and Randy Michaels threw him under the bus . . . which is kind of like Adolf Hitler indefinitely suspending Joseph Goebbels for being a Nazi.

This, of course, brings us to the A-No. 1 Bigtime Reason for the Undoing of Lee Abrams (and, by the way, this is NSFW):


LEE F***ED UP. He trusted Randy Michaels.

As a result, he became the noise everyone ignored.

The National Buffoon's Tribune House

Before Tuesday, there was a little bit left of the Tribune Co., after Sam Zell bought it and hired Randy Michaels to turn it into Delta House.

The bankruptcy judges had been trying to make sure of that.

Now, the carcass of a once-respected media empire pretty much has been obliterated by this story in The New York Times. The Gray Lady did to Michaels' corporate toga party what Dean Wormer wanted to do to the Deltas, but couldn't pull off.

And then, to add insult to nuclear annihilation, the Times informs the Tribune crew that "Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life."

YOU WON'T believe it until you read it. And even then, maybe not:

In January 2008, soon after the venerable Tribune Company was sold for $8.2 billion, Randy Michaels, a new top executive, ran into several other senior colleagues at the InterContinental Hotel next to the Tribune Tower in Chicago.

Mr. Michaels, a former radio executive and disc jockey, had been handpicked by Sam Zell, a billionaire who was the new controlling shareholder, to run much of the media company’s vast collection of properties, including The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, WGN America and The Chicago Cubs.

After Mr. Michaels arrived, according to two people at the bar that night, he sat down and said, “watch this,” and offered the waitress $100 to show him her breasts. The group sat dumbfounded.

“Here was this guy, who was responsible for all these people, getting drunk in front of senior people and saying this to a waitress who many of us knew,” said one of the Tribune executives present, who declined to be identified because he had left the company and did not want to be quoted criticizing a former employer. “I have never seen anything like it.”

Mr. Michaels, who otherwise declined to be interviewed, said through a spokesman, “I never made the comment allegedly attributed to me in January 2008 to a waitress at the InterContinental Hotel, and anyone who said I did so is either lying or mistaken.”

It was a preview of what would become a rugged ride under the new ownership. Mr. Zell and Mr. Michaels, who was promoted to chief executive of the Tribune Company in December 2009, arrived with much fanfare, suggesting they were going to breathe innovation and reinvention into the conservative company.

By all accounts, the reinvention did not go well. At a time when the media industry has struggled, the debt-ridden Tribune Company has done even worse. Less than a year after Mr. Zell bought the company, it tipped into bankruptcy, listing $7.6 billion in assets against a debt of $13 billion, making it the largest bankruptcy in the history of the American media industry. More than 4,200 people have lost jobs since the purchase, while resources for the Tribune newspapers and television stations have been slashed.

The new management did transform the work culture, however. Based on interviews with more than 20 employees and former employees of Tribune, Mr. Michaels’s and his executives’ use of sexual innuendo, poisonous workplace banter and profane invective shocked and offended people throughout the company. Tribune Tower, the architectural symbol of the staid company, came to resemble a frat house, complete with poker parties, juke boxes and pervasive sex talk.

The company said Mr. Michaels had the support of the board.

“Randy is a tremendous motivator, very charismatic, but he is very nontraditional,” said Frank Wood, a member of the Tribune board. “He has the kind of approach that motivates many people and offends others, but we think he’s done a great job.”

The company is now frozen in what seems to be an endless effort to emerge from bankruptcy. (The case entered mediation in September after negotiations failed, and a new agreement between two primary lenders was recently announced.) But even as the company foundered, the tight circle of executives, many with longtime ties to Mr. Michaels, received tens of millions of dollars in bonuses.

Behind the collapse of the Tribune deal and the bankruptcy is a classic example of financial hubris. Mr. Zell, a hard-charging real estate mogul with virtually no experience in the newspaper business, decided that a deal financed with heavy borrowing and followed with aggressive cost-cutting could succeed where the longtime Tribune executives he derided as bureaucrats had failed.

And while many media companies tried cost-cutting and new tactics in the last few years, Tribune was particularly aggressive in planning publicity stunts and in mixing advertising with editorial material. Those efforts alienated longtime employees and audiences in the communities its newspapers served.

“They threw out what Tribune had stood for, quality journalism and a real brand integrity, and in just a year, pushed it down into mud and bankruptcy,” said Ken Doctor, a newspaper analyst with Outsell Inc., a consulting firm. “And it’s been wallowing there for the last 20 months with no end in sight.”

Mr. Zell has acknowledged that the deal has not turned out how he hoped. But noting a recent upturn in results, he said through a spokesman, “Tribune has made significant strides in becoming a current, competitive and sustainable media company. The measure of management’s performance is reflected in the increased profitability of Tribune’s media properties.”

NO, SAM, deals rarely turn out like you hoped when you pay too much for properties with too much borrowed money, then put arrested-development corporate scumbags in charge to create a toxic work environment in the name of "creativity," while systematically jettisoning human capital and laying waste to whatever value Tribune's media products once had.

Hang on, though. It gets better, which means worse.

Mr. Michaels, who was initially in charge of Tribune’s broadcasting and interactive businesses as well as six newspapers, was a former shock jock who made a name for himself — and a lot of money for Mr. Zell — by scooping up radio stations while at the Zell-controlled Jacor Communications. Jacor was later sold to Clear Channel Communications for $4.4 billion.

In turn, Mr. Michaels remade Tribune’s management, installing in major positions more than 20 former associates from the radio business — people he knew from his time running Jacor and Clear Channel — a practice that came to be known as “friends and family” at the company.

One of their first priorities was rewriting the employee handbook.

“Working at Tribune means accepting that you might hear a word that you, personally, might not use,” the new handbook warned. “You might experience an attitude you don’t share. You might hear a joke that you don’t consider funny. That is because a loose, fun, nonlinear atmosphere is important to the creative process.” It then added, “This should be understood, should not be a surprise and not considered harassment.”

The new permissive ethos was quickly on display. When Kim Johnson, who had worked with Mr. Michaels as an executive at Clear Channel, was hired as senior vice president of local sales on June 16, 2008, the news release said she was “a former waitress at Knockers — the Place for Hot Racks and Cold Brews,” a jocular reference to a fictitious restaurant chain.

A woman who used to work at the Tribune Company in a senior position, but did not want to be identified because she now worked at another media company in Chicago, said that Mr. Michaels and Marc Chase, who was brought in to run Tribune Interactive, had a loud conversation on an open balcony above a work area about the sexual suitability of various employees.

“The conversation just wafted down on all of the people who were sitting there.” She also said that she was present at a meeting where a female executive jovially offered to bring in her assistant to perform a sexual act on someone in a meeting who seemed to be in a bad mood.

Staff members who had concerns did not have many options, given the state of the media business in Chicago, the woman said. “Not many people could afford to leave. The people who could leave, did. But it was not in my best interest to have my name connected to an E.E.O.C. suit,” she said, referring to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (Indeed, there are no current E.E.O.C. complaints against the Tribune Company.)

There have been complaints about Mr. Michaels in the past, however. In 1995, Mr. Michaels and Jacor settled a suit brought by Liz Richards, a former talk show host in Florida who filed an E.E.O.C. complaint and a civil suit, saying she had been bitten on the neck by Mr. Michaels and that he walked through the office wearing a sexual device around his neck.

“They were like 14-year-old boys — no boundaries at all — but with money and power,” Ms. Richards said in an interview.

THIS COMPORTS with Michaels' reputation in radio. And anyone who thought that one of the middle-aged juveniles who helped destroy radio broadcasting would do the opposite in a field they knew even less about . . . well, we need a hit of whatever he's smoking.

Especially after reading that New York Times piece.

Duh.

Katrina vanden Heuvel is worried about poverty -- it's getting bad.

Really bad.

Really, really bad.

Crazy bad, says the editor and publisher of The Nation in her Washington Post column last Tuesday:

It's clear that the Great Recession battered those on the bottom most heavily, adding 6 million people to the ranks of the officially poor, defined as just $22,000 in annual income for a family of four. Forty-four million Americans -- one in seven citizens -- are now living below the poverty line, more than at any time since the Census Bureau began tracking poverty 51 years ago. Shamefully, that figure includes one in five children, more than one in four African Americans or Latinos, and over 51 percent of female-headed families with children under 6.

These numbers are bad enough. But dig deeper -- as Georgetown University law professor Peter Edelman has been doing for nearly 50 years in his battle against poverty -- and the story told by these figures is even more staggering.

Edelman points out that 19 million people are now living in "extreme poverty," which is under 50 percent of the poverty line, or $11,000 for a family of four. "That means over 43 percent of the poor are extremely poor," said Edelman, who served as an aide to Sen. Robert Kennedy (D-N.Y.) and in the Clinton administration before resigning in protest over welfare reform that shredded the safety net. "That's over 6 percent of the population, and that figure has just been climbing up and up."

(snip)

Beyond what Congress can do immediately, it's clear that America needs a broader movement to create a more just and higher-wage economy. Edelman and other advocates say that we will need to push to make it easier for people to join labor unions through an Employee Free Choice Act or at least reduce legal barriers to organizing. The minimum wage should also be indexed to half the average wage.

"But you're still going to have a gap," said Edelman. "And you essentially have to invent some new idea of a wage supplement that starts from the premise that the so-called good jobs went away a long time ago and we've become a nation of low-wage work."

That's why 100 million people are struggling to make ends meet on less than $44,000 per year.

This devastating economic reality has the potential to create new political alliances -- and shape a 21st-century anti-poverty movement. Such a movement is urgently needed because the voices of the poor, of workers and of those struggling to get by are barely heard in the halls of power these days. Anti-poverty groups and advocates with ideas for a more equitable economy are often marginalized within even Democratic Party policy circles that seem hard-wired to reject them.

We know what needs to be done to reduce poverty. The question is who will fight that fight? And who will listen?

SOMEBODY HAS to do something about this, and the leftist journalist wants to know whom that will be.

Well, obviously not the leftists -- and note I don't use "leftist" as a perjorative; I tend to be one on many issues. That's because leftists like vanden Heuvel, back in 1972, blew up the broad-based, left-of-center Democratic coalition in favor of a purer, narrower radical coalition dedicated not to eliminating poverty and advancing social justice, but instead to promoting the sexual revolution and smashing the influence of social conservatives in the party.

That gave us a Democratic Party unable to beg, borrow or buy the kind of presidential and congressional clout it enjoyed before the "revolution." It gave us one contentious term for Jimmy Carter, while also giving us the reality of Reagan Democrats. Not to mention Ronald Reagan himself.

The libertine left also gave us the religious right.

And Bill Clinton surviving for two terms only by governing as a just-right-of-moderate Republican would have -- by gutting welfare (which vexes the left so) and giving Wall Street slicksters the keys to the candy store.

As we well know, this has led us to the fine mess we enjoy now, including those exploding rates of extreme poverty, as well as an anything-goes social and familial landscape of such chaos that it scarcely can deal with flush times, much less the Great Recession.

Thus, after much deliberation, more observation and ample aggravation, this New Deal-loving, old-time Catholic lefty has something to say to Ms. vanden Heuvel and her fellow secular, upper-crust, boutique lefties about the river they're crying on behalf of the impoverished abstractions they probably never encounter concretely:

I call bullshit.

The banality -- and stupidity -- of evil

DUUUUUDE! My roomie is sooooo gay!

No, really!

Watch the webcam, dude! He has no idea, man!

Lookit, I'm putting it on the video chat. Dare you to watch. LOL!

I ought to watch this stoned, dude. This is soooooo f***in' FUNNY!

AH . . . THOSE college hijunks, right? Just a little routine fun for a generation brought up on moral relativism and a deluge of Internet porn, right?

This deadly serious Associated Press story out of Rutgers begs to differ:

A college student jumped to his death off a bridge a day after authorities say two classmates surreptitiously recorded him having sex with a man in his dorm room and broadcast it over the Internet.

Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge last week, said his family's attorney, Paul Mainardi. Police recovered a man's body Wednesday afternoon in the Hudson River just north of the bridge, and authorities were trying to determine if it was Clementi's.

ABC News and The Star-Ledger of Newark reported that Clementi left on his Facebook page on Sept. 22 a note that read: "Jumping off the gw bridge sorry." On Wednesday, his Facebook page was accessible only to friends.

Two Rutgers freshmen have been charged with illegally taping the 18-year-old Clementi having sex and broadcasting the images via an Internet chat program.

Steven Goldstein, chairman of the gay rights group Garden State Equality, said in a statement Wednesday that his group considers Clementi's death a hate crime.

"We are heartbroken over the tragic loss of a young man who, by all accounts, was brilliant, talented and kind," Goldstein said. "And we are sickened that anyone in our society, such as the students allegedly responsible for making the surreptitious video, might consider destroying others' lives as a sport."

It wasn't immediately clear what Clementi's sexual orientation was, and a call asking the family's lawyer about it was not immediately returned Wednesday.

One of the defendants, Dharun Ravi, was Clementi's roommate, Mainardi told The Star-Ledger. The other defendant is Molly Wei. Ravi and Wei could face up to five years in prison if they are convicted.

(snip)

A Twitter account belonging to a Ravi was recently deleted, but in a cached version retained through Google he sent a message on Sept. 19: "Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly's room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay."

Two days later, he wrote on Twitter: "Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes it's happening again."

GAY-RIGHTS groups will argue this was an affront against the rights and dignity of gays and lesbians everywhere. That is an incomplete -- and self-serving -- take on such monstrous behavior so casually undertaken.

This act of personal destruction, as sophomoric and banal as it was consequential, was an affront against human rights and dignity. If the spied-upon roommate had been an 18-year-old female engaged in heterosexual relations, then had been labeled a slut and made fun of . . . all of it live on the Internet in an amateur attempt at pornographic "reality TV" -- and then had become so distraught she took a flying leap off a high bridge, would the whole situation be any less horrific?

Would the crime be any less heinous?

Should the alleged perps, if convicted, get only three months in prison instead of five years?

I didn't think so.

You know, my greatest fear about this generation is it may be one that's lost its grip on dignity. On very old-fashioned notions such as "propriety" and "modesty."

I fear my generation has raised its children to respect all things (and people) in theory, none in practice. May God have mercy on us all.

Not that we deserve it.

Pigs do it . . . dogs do it. . . .

Back in the olden days of Midwestern radio, a "Barn Dance Frolic" was a hillbilly-music program that aired Saturday nights on WHO out of Des Moines, Iowa.

Today in American high schools, including all across the great American midriff, what you see on the dance floor might also be described as a "barn dance frolic." As in, "Pigs do it, cows do it, even dogs and sheep do it . . . OH MY GOD, BILLY AND MARY ARE DOING IT IN FRONT OF THE WHOLE SCHOOL!"

Well, not exactly. Genitalia remain covered, and the kids call it "dancing."

AND RIGHT HERE in River City, the Omaha World-Herald is talking about how it's giving high-school administrators fits:

The dance style known as grinding — pelvis to pelvis gyrations, typically with the boy behind the girl — has grown popular at high school dances, but several school administrators say it's indecent.

With homecoming season in full swing at Omaha-area high schools, administrators are employing a variety of tactics aimed at cleaning up dirty dancing.

“Every school needs to stop this,” said Jonna Andersen, principal at St. Albert Catholic School in Council Bluffs, who cracked down for this year's homecoming dance.

Andersen warned students ahead of time that they must dance face-to-face, and if they didn't, the music would be stopped. Letters went home alerting parents to the rules, and administrators enlisted help from the homecoming court to encourage students to abide by them.

School officials were concerned about how students might respond, and planned to stop the dance if they didn't comply, she said. But the dance a week ago ended up well-attended, students followed the rules, and they reported having a good time, Andersen said.

ONE MIGHT say that if Catholic schools are having to tell their teenagers that dancing like you're doing it "doggie style" is morally problematic and not decent for public consumption, something has gone horribly wrong with Catholic catechesis and moral training -- both at school and at home --in the preceding decade.

Of course, one also might say that's obvious, so why bring it up? I dunno, maybe it's because "obvious" stroked out and died about 20 years ago. Back to the story. . . .

Although it's nothing new for young people's dancing to alarm the older generation, Lincoln Southwest High School Principal Rob Slauson said the current trend in dancing goes “way beyond” the days of Elvis Presley gyrating his hips on stage. The students are “simulating sex,” he said.

“We're talking about a situation now where the young lady is facing away from the man, and at times she's putting her hands on the floor, raising her rear end,” he said.

“And in some dances, the girls are wearing short skirts and the guys actually pull the skirts up while they're dancing. And then there's contact between her groin area and his groin area.”

Chaperones have a difficult time policing the dances when students form a circle in the middle of the dance floor and the adults can't see what's going on, he said. High school dances can attract more than a thousand students.

Slauson said he warned students about their dancing before last year's prom. Although the situation improved, they still resisted, he said.

School officials last June decided to step up their response and prohibit guests from other schools at Southwest's dances, with the exception of prom. It's easier for school administrators to discipline their own students than those from other schools, he said.

Slauson said the policy was a “shot across the bow” to let students know the administration was serious about cracking down.

METHINKS "shots across the bow" aren't going to touch on the larger problem -- including what these school administrators are going to be dealing with next year as their student bodies continue to marinate in this sort of cultural stew.

(NOTE: The first "how to" video probably is safe for work. The following teenage application of "grinding" principles definitely isn't -- in fact, it's what we Catholics call a "near occasion of sin." I wouldn't advise watching any more than necessary to get the idea of what kids find acceptable on the dance floor.)




MY FIRST reaction to this stuff is "They have to teach dry humping?"

My second reaction is that what ordinary folk used to consider public indecency -- and still would be considered sexual harassment in the workplace -- is what kids today consider "normal," which pretty much is the end of the line of what we consider (or at least once considered) "civilization."

Folks, this isn't just another instance of kids "pushing the envelope" and scandalizing the old folks. That ended somewhere short of dry humping.

This is flat-out simulated sex, and the only place to go from here is the real thing.

In public.

At your kid's high school.

Perhaps with your kid.

SO, DON'T GIVE me that crap about Boomers scandalizing the folks with the bump, and bobby-soxers scandalizing great-grandpa by doing the jitterbug. Nobody ever found condoms on the floor after the high-school hop back when TV would only show Elvis Presley from the waist up.

The condoms-on-the-floor thing came from this MSNBC story in February.

What we're dealing with here is mass abandonment of human dignity -- the continuing objectification of human beings, if you will. When you're "grinding" little Susie on the dance floor, you're not enjoying the company (or the beauty) of a wonderful girl with a sparkling personality and winning smile. Instead, you're getting what jollies you can in public with a butt and a vagina -- albeit covered (for now) -- that happen to have a torso, head and legs attached.

For young women, substitute the appropriate male "features."

(Please. Don't give me that bull about it being "not sexual." I'm not an idiot, and I understand the physiology of, and the stimuli involved with, sexual intercourse.)

Back about the time of the fall of Rome, in a Christmas homily, Pope Leo I reminded the faithful of who and what they were:

Christian, remember your dignity, and now that you share in God’s own nature, do not return by sin to your former base condition. Bear in mind who is your head and of whose body you are a member. Do not forget that you have been rescued from the power of darkness and brought into the light of God’s kingdom.

THAT'S JUST so much history. Leo the Great has been dead for millennia, and now so is dignity.

And judging by the cultural evidence surrounding us, we even regard ourselves as nothing more than exceptionally intelligent farm animals. Who engage in "barn dance frolics."

If I were a school administrator, I'd be tempted to break up the "freak dancing" with the strategic application of a cattle prod.

It's the only thing animals understand, after all . . . and it's not like the kiddies could complain that I was offending their dignity. That, they -- we -- discarded a while back.

Dying for sex

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No matter how we try and try, and then try again, to make ourselves into figurative tubs of Chiffon -- remember Chiffon? -- we crash and burn upon the rock-hard realities of "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature."

Oftentimes, this principle is demonstrated most starkly and tragically when it comes into conflict with the modern-day dogma of universal autonomy, which holds that "f***ing is an entitlement." NBC News unveiled the latest chapter of an interminable tale of hubris and woe this morning on Today (above) and on MSNBC:

Pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson may have known years ago about the deadly risks of its birth control patch Ortho Evra, according to internal documents obtained by NBC News.

Patient reports between 2002 and 2004 show that Ortho Evra was 12 times more likely to cause strokes and 18 times more likely to cause blood clots than the conventional birth control pill, NBC News' TODAY show revealed Wednesday.

When Ortho Evra first hit the market in 2002, it was a big hit. "Time" magazine called it one of the best inventions of the year and doctors have written nearly 40 million prescriptions for it. But as sales surged, so did claims of injury and even death.

Some experts say the patch is problematic because it delivers a continuous and high level of estrogen — 60 percent more estrogen than the pill. When a birth control pill is swallowed, it quickly dissolves into the system. But with the patch, estrogen keeps flowing into the bloodstream for an entire week.

"With the patch… there's no relief of the body of the woman from getting estrogen," Dr. Sidney Wolfe, Medical Director of watchdog group Public Citizen, told NBC.

Concern over the patch has led to high-level resignations at Johnson & Johnson.

In 2005, Johnson & Johnson Vice President Dr. Patrick Caubel suddenly quit, saying in his resignation letter, "I have been involved in the safety evaluation of Ortho Evra since its introduction on the market. … The estrogenic exposure [of the patch] was unusually high, as was the rate of fatalities."

His letter, which was obtained by NBC, said the research was "compelling evidence" that the company ignored. Therefore, he wrote, "it became impossible for me to stay in my position as VP."

NBC's investigation also found a lawsuit by another Johnson & Johnson vice president, Dr. Joel Lippman, who is suing the company for unlawful termination after he says he blew the whistle on the patch's dangerously high levels of estrogen, even before it came to market.

The company, he says, "disregarded his concerns and launched the product anyway."

"The company knew about much of it, if not all of it," said Dr. Wolfe. "They thought correctly that it wouldn't sell as well if you told people how dangerous it was."

NATURAL LAW isn't a popular concept in the postmodern West, but that doesn't make it any less valid. Everything has a purpose. Natural systems, and this includes Homo sapiens, have a certain economy.

Certain plants grow best within a certain environment, and humans thrive only within certain parameters -- physiologically, sociologically and morally. We don't want to hear this, however, because being fallen creatures, we want to do what we want to do.

(For that matter, we don't want to hear that we're fallen, either.)

And we'll find ways to deny the consequences of our doing exactly what we want to do. Which brings us into direct conflict with the one immutable reality of earthly existence -- "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature."


THERE WILL be consequences when you violate the law -- moral and physical. Most of them will be ugly.

In every instance, though, we're going to keep trying our damnedest (in every sense of "damnedest") to do just that. You see, in this sad case, we find that the corollary to "f***ing is an entitlement" is more important than the main point itself:

"Making billions of dollars off 'f***ing is an entitlement' is far greater entitlement than f***ing. And we'll kill you to do it."

Masturbatory politics: Losing never felt so good

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Scratch many "progressives," and what you'll find is . . . Glenn Beck tripping on Viagra.

Replace the "Ground Zero imam," Feisal Abdul Rauf with Christine O'Donnell, the Republicans' nominee for U.S. Senate in Delaware, and you basically have folks like Media Matters and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow doing Glenn Beck's schtick -- just not quite so craziliciously well as Beck does it.

O'Donnell is a tea-party candidate. She has Sarah Palin as a patron. She has a financially checkered past, with allegations of lying, hypocrisy and cheating former campaign workers thrown in for good measure.

That's a lot for a liberal to work with, politically.

SO WHAT do "progressives" think O'Donnell's Achilles' heel is? She's against masturbation.

Well, so is the pope. It's called Catholic moral theology. In fact, lots of Christians are foursquare against pleasuring oneself, and fornication of all sorts. So are Muslims.

But you don't see Maddow, or Media Matters -- or, in fact, any other "progressive" voice -- crying out against Muslims' horrible intolerance of whacking off. What you instead hear is a cacophony of "progressive" voices condemning the likes of Beck, Newt Gingrich and all manner of tea-party nutjobs for their bigotry toward American Muslims.

You hear them condemning the intolerant right for holding Muslims, and their faith, in the same sort of contempt "progressives" reserve for the long-established, orthodox Christian approach to sexual ethics.

Americans, it seems to me, might take the left's pleas for tolerance a lot more seriously if "progressives" weren't such contemptible hypocrites.

Gitchi gitchi ya ya Gaga

One of Britain's top hitmakers thinks, anymore, that pop music is one giant miss.

And that Gaga is no lady.

And that you'd be mortified to listen to any of what he calls "soft pornography" with your mum in the room.

Mike Stock, with co-writing or co-producing credits on 16 No. 1 records in the U.K., is mad as hell . . . and he's taking his anger to the pages of the Daily Mail:

The man who helped launch the career of Kylie Minogue yesterday condemned modern pop culture for 'sexualising' youngsters.

Mike Stock, one third of the legendary pop factory Stock, Aitken and Waterman, said: 'The music industry has gone too far. It's not about me being old fashioned. It's about keeping values that are important in the modern world.

'These days you can't watch modern stars - like Britney Spears or Lady Gaga - with a two-year-old.

Ninety-nine per cent of the charts is R 'n' B and 99 per cent of that is soft pornography.'

He continued: 'Kids are being forced to grow up too young. Look at the videos. I wouldn't necessarily want my young kids to watch them.

'I would certainly be embarrassed to sit there with my mum.'

Mr Stock, 58, pictured below, was behind the rise of Miss Minogue in the late 1980s when she stormed the charts with I Should Be So Lucky.

In the accompanying video, she wore a simple black cocktail dress. The lyrics were similarly innocent.

In contrast, 24-year-old Lady Gaga, who burst on to the scene two years ago, has regularly used crude metaphors in her lyrics as well as posing in revealing outfits.

Mr Stock believes that today's children are being 'sexualised' as a result of images put out by the pop industry of stars such as Lady Gaga.

He said: 'Mothers of young children are worried because you can't control the TV remote control.

'Before children even step into school, they have all these images - the pop videos and computer games like Grand Theft Auto - confronting them and the parents can't control it. Talking to mothers' groups, they were saying that even they have lost faith in brands like Disney.

THE PROOF in Stock's pop-tart pudding, however, just might be found in the comments on the story on the Mail's website:

"I'm a 17 year old girl and completely agree with this article. I don't watch these music videos, but other kids in my school do. With them having that image of what's 'cool' they make fun of everyone else who isn't like that. I'm part of the 'popular' group at school, but I'm still constantly made fun of because I don't have sex and I don't dress sexy," says Christina from Ohio.

But there's another big criticism of the whole pop-sleaze phenomenon no one has mentioned yet. It's boring.

It's stupid.

It's mindless.

And all in all, music built almost exclusively upon a foundation of disinterested, mechanical intercourse barely rises to the time-honored romanticizing of lust. Actually, this masterpiece of tediousness by Lady Gaga sounds more like a junkie's ode to the monkey on his back:

I'm on a mission
and it involves some heavy touching, yeah
You've indicated you're interest
I'm educated in sex, yes
and now I want it bad, want it bad
A lovegame, a lovegame

Hold me and love me
just want touch you for a minute
Maybe three seconds is enough
For my heart to quit it

Let's have some fun, this beat is sick
I wanna take a ride on your disco stick
Don't think too much, just bust that kick
I wanna take a ride on your disco stick

AND THEN the big finale:

Let's play a lovegame
Play a lovegame
Do you want love
Or you want fame
Are you in the game (Don't think too much just bust that kick)
Dons the lovegame (I wanna take a ride on your disco stick)

Huh!

OK, not a junkie's ode. Make it a crack whore's instead.

Huh! indeed.

Hey! We have our standards!

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Let me see if I have this straight. Or gay. I forget.

The country is in an uproar over gay marriage, because that's all weird and stuff, because the gays found out that everybody else was married to somebody else on Facebook and all they had was a crappy little ceremony in the San Francisco courthouse, when everybody else gets a destination wedding in Italy -- and then one at Disney World, complete with fireworks but no divorce, which is so easy today that half of all married couples get one (So what's the deal with forgetting that common little detail?) -- and that's, like, bigamy, only the lawyers say they're just being drama queens, because nobody sexted them pictures of their junk like Brett Favre, who supposedly texted pictures of himself playing with his while wearing Crocs -- Crocs? -- because Jenn Sterger is hot and kinda looks like his wife, only 16 years younger and not a grandma.

We know Sterger because she's got a show on Versus because she used to go to Florida State football games damn near nekkid, which got her enhanced physique into Maxim and Playboy -- before she took her implants out, because she wanted to, like, totally go countercultural here -- which led to a Sports Illustrated column and a gig as a New York Jets sideline reporter, which is what apparently intrigued Mr. Retirement's penis, and now Whoopi Goldberg is all pissed off and cussing a blue streak at gate crashers, if not penis posers, which makes Michaele Salahi cry, because somebody's gonna be irate when pictures of your wanger end up on Facebook for your other wife to find, and why should gays have to miss out on that kind of wedded bliss?

AND WHY DID Michelle Obama ditch the prez on his birthday anyway to spend hundreds of grand on a Spanish vacay with the kid?

I ask this because we are a sensible, sober and moral people who think marriage is sacred and not to be trifled with by just any Tom, Dick or Harry. Or any consenting combination of the above.


IT IS the very sanctity of marriage and the spiritual and cultural gravity of sexuality (and how we use it) that is what's behind the monster effin' rush you get by boinking pert little interns less than half your age. Or sleeping your way up the corporate food chain.

Or so they say over at ESPN.

At least the shipping is discreet

Y'all, this is what the end of the world looks like. Really.

It looks like a bunch of sniggering hens talking about finger (expletive deleted) -- complete with a leering, old-lady librarian sagely advising the young'uns about autofreakeration -- while Corporate America turns millstones into stockholder value. The Huns, Visigoths, Vandals and other barbarians had nothing on us.

Nothing.

Free press and the 'fun' of sexting

If anyone in the journalism universe is thinking about making the squelching of the March edition of Omaha North's student newspaper a First Amendment cause célèbre . . . don't.

This is no fit hill on which to die.

Take lazy student "journalists" who can't be bothered with more than a single viewpoint. Add an "in-depth" section on sex. Season with prurient photos and a condoms-on-bananas tutorial.

Then leave out all information on -- for just one example -- sexually transmitted diseases. Serve with a side article about the "fun" and risks of "sexting."

Fun?

You mean "fun" like five years in the state pen on a child-pornography rap if someone forwards an explicit photo to a buddy?

IT TAKES some doing to make prior restraint seem the lesser of evils, but the staff of the North Star just may have pulled off something special here.

No, after reading this morning's Omaha World-Herald article on the complete lack of professionalism (and good taste) at the North Star -- produced, regrettably, as part of the school's journalism curriculum -- you won't want to be organizing a First Amendment campaign on the students' behalf. Besides, there's also this.

The Omaha North High School journalism teacher has been disciplined after the principal stopped distribution of the March edition of the student newspaper.

A copy of the North Star viewed by The World-Herald included a four-page “In-Depth” section about teens and sex.

The main headline: “Life on the Sheets. Everyone has hormones, but learning how to control them is what matters.”

Articles and graphics focused on sex drive; masturbation; the district's pro-abstinence human growth and development curriculum; the fun and risks of sexting; and how to put on a condom, using a banana in step-by-step photos. Each article was written by a staff member.

There was no mention of the high prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases among young people in Omaha and no perspective from teen parents or from teens committed to abstinence.

The main photo, taken by a North Star staff member, shows the back of an unidentifiable female, with her partner's hands reaching around her to remove her bra.

(snip)

Nelson said that the school has a “very diverse student body” and that the material would have been offensive to some North students and their families.

Aerts is “back in the classroom,” Nelson said. She declined to elaborate on how the teacher was disciplined, saying it was a personnel matter.

JOURNALISM ISN'T just about freedom of the press. Journalism is equally about the obligation its practitioners have to their public . . . and to the truth.

If the World-Herald writers have kept faith with their public and gotten this story right, it's pretty clear North Star staffers violated the trust of the North High audience. And if the March issue of the North Star actually had gotten into the hands of the Omaha North community -- too many of whom know first-hand the serious repercussions of "Life on the Sheets," repercussions the newspaper staff apparently couldn't be bothered to investigate -- that breach could have been even more significant.

Prurience plus sloppy reporting equals misinformation. That's serious matter . . . and serious journalistic malfeasance.

The right to freely put pen to paper -- or type to page, or pixels to a computer screen -- is a lot like the sex act. It is exhilarating. It can be great fun. It is of great import. It is the exercise of tremendous power. It can be an act of love. It can be a wonderful, joyous thing.

Holy, even.

And it also can be exercised irresponsibly, thereby becoming the immediate cause of great pain. Great injustice. Even, you might say, of great evil.

Sex isn't exactly rocket science, despite its potential to blow up in your face if misused. Ditto for journalism. There are important prerequisites for engaging in either, but they are pretty basic.

The lack of maturity exhibited by the would-be "journalistic" exhibitionists of the North Star, however, reveals a bunch of snot-nosed kids who obviously have no business experimenting with either.