Employees??? We're Gannett. We don't need no stinkin' employees!

Gannett is to newspapers as Clear Channel is to radio.

Maybe worse.

This, of course, means "shareholder value" trumps "public service" every time . . . and you won't find much of either on the doorstep before you have that first cup of coffee in the morning gloam.

Oh, who the hell am I kidding? Nowadays, your morning newspaper probably is so skimpy, you'll be lucky if the slightest breeze hasn't blown it down the street long before you get out of bed.

STILL, you're the lucky one if you still have a compelling reason to get out of bed in the morning . . . like a job. That's no longer the case for a lot of folks who, until recently, were proud employees of the Daily Blab.

And nowhere is that more the case than in the moneygrubbing world of Gannett, as exemplified by the plight of The Daily Advertiser in Lafayette, La.. If you can stand it, consider, please, this account from The Independent Weekly:

The Lafayette City-Parish Council did not meet this week. The Daily Advertiser, the official journal of record that is paid more than $240,000 annually to publish public notices, failed to print the council’s agenda Friday, violating the Home Rule Charter that requires publication of the agenda within two working days of the meeting.

“It just didn’t get done,” says Janet Gianelloni, the city-parish council’s administrative assistant.

The public blunder is just one outward sign of the chaos taking place on Bertrand Drive and indicative of much bigger problems at Lafayette’s daily paper. The Advertiser has been undergoing cuts since 2005, massive ones in the past five months, all handed down by corporate media giant Gannett. The publicly traded entity has been sucking the life out of what has been one of its most lucrative papers to offset losses elsewhere and placate antsy short-term, profit-oriented shareholders.

In fact, the longtime legal clerk who handled public notices for the paper was among those laid off in a 50 percent reduction to the classified department, which appears to explain why the mistake was made.

Demoralized by the cuts, the local workforce has no one to complain to. Bean counters in McLean, Va. — who as a former Louisiana Gannett publisher says just happen to be in the newspaper business — are calling all the shots. By The Independent Weekly’s estimates, about 75 positions have been cut in the last year from Gannett’s local operations (The Advertiser’s Web site claims it has 277 employees but that likely hasn’t been updated), including longtime staffers like columnist Jim Bradshaw, whose forced retirement went unannounced in the paper. After 40 years of writing, Bradshaw just disappeared.

On Sunday, Jan. 4, Publisher Leslie Hurst announced changes to the Sunday and daily editions of the paper in a front page letter. “These changes are a response to difficult economic times,” she wrote, noting that while our community has been mostly spared by the national recession, “the challenges at the national level still affect us.” What she failed to say is that it’s Gannett’s challenges, not the nation’s, that are trickling down.

The following day the changes hit home. The Monday paper was a single section, with no page dedicated to national and world news and no classified section.

On top of the flimsy 16-pager, which weighed all of 2 ounces, The Advertiser recently spiked the cost of its paper from 50 cents to 75 cents ($1.25 on Sunday) even as it was slashing staff and drastically dropping coverage. That same Monday’s privately held Advocate, on the other hand, was twice the heft at still only 50 cents.

(snip)

Out of the havoc Gannett has wreaked on Lafayette’s daily paper, however, there are stories of selflessness — poignant examples of human kindness. First, there is this one — as told to us by a former employee — involving Baton Rouge political writers John Hill and Mike Hasten, both of whom were summoned to Lafayette for a top management meeting in July 2007. Hill, Gannett Louisiana’s Baton Rouge capital bureau chief with 38 years as a reporter and columnist, was told if he did not retire Hasten would be let go. We all know how that one ended.

“The early retirement buyout came at an opportune time for me, as I had offers on the table that I was contemplating,” says Hill. “I joked with Mike that I fell on the sword for him; he shot back that it was a velvet sword.”

More recently in the classified department, which serves The Advertiser, Daily World, Times of Acadiana and Town Talk, one of two supervisors had to go. The decision was made to terminate Fils Prejean and keep longtime employee Ed Breaux. “As Fils walked around the building giving his last good-byes, Ed became upset because Fils is the sole supporter for his family [with three young children still at home], whereas Ed’s child is grown, and he only supports himself and his wife,” says an employee who witnessed the day’s events. “Before Fils could make his way to the door, Ed went to HR and volunteered to be laid off. Just that fast, Fils was back on the job, and Ed was laid off.”

Want to know what Fils Prejean got for Christmas? His walking papers.

YET ANOTHER media company is found to be totally unworthy of its employees, both the ones who have been fired . . . and the ones yet to be. That would be the rest of them.

I'm so shocked.

3 Chords & the Truth: It's getting hot in here

This week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth is hot.

It's smokin'.

It's burning-up, smokin' hot.

On cold, gray days like one is wont to find this time of the winter, that can be a good thing. So why don't you cozy up next to your computer -- or snuggle up with your iPod -- and warm yourself in the glow of the Big Show.

It might even warm your heart. Or something.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

The Omaha Cubs

I think we've just found a new baseball team for the new downtown Omaha Baseball Stadium TD Ameritrade Park.

And it's major league.

ACCORDING to The Chicago Tribune:

After nearly two years of intrigue, the billionaire Ricketts family has emerged as the winning bidder to purchase the Chicago Cubs from Tribune Co. for about $900 million, a source close to the winning bid said Thursday evening.

The family will now complete negotiations with Tribune Co.

The family edged out Chicago real-estate investor Hersch Klaff and New York private-equity investor Marc Utay, a Chicago native, for the chance to follow Tribune Co., the Chicago-based media conglomerate, as owners of the storied yet hard-luck franchise.

The Ricketts family effort, led by Tom Ricketts, who lives in the Chicago area, still has a number of hurdles to cross before taking ownership of the Cubs, including receiving approval from 23 of the league's 30 owners.

Cubs officials have said they hope to have sale completed by the start of the new season in April.

The deal would represent a return to family ownership for the Cubs. Before Tribune took control of the team in 1981, the Wrigley family, founders of the chewing-gum company, owned the Cubs for 65 years. The clan sold the team and Wrigley Field to the media company, which owns the Chicago Tribune, for $20.5 million.

In Chicago, the Ricketts family is hardly as well known as the Wrigleys, or any of the current owners of the city's major professional sports franchises, but certainly that would change quickly for the new custodians of one of the country's best-known teams, as well as one of its most storied stadiums. Along with the Cubs, the Ricketts are buying Wrigley Field, and a 25 percent stake in a regional cable sports network.

The family patriarch, J. Joe Ricketts, grew up in Omaha and started a discount stock brokerage. In the 1990s he transformed the company into an Internet trading powerhouse now known as TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. He is ranked among the world's billionaires, according to Forbes magazine, with an estimated net worth of $1.2 billion. Shares of the company are also owned by his wife and four children.

I THINK THE CUBS will be a perfect fit for Omaha. After all, the ol' cowtown has long experience with crappy baseball teams, most notably the Omaha Royals, Triple-A farm club of the sub-woeful Kansas City Royals.

Compared to that, it's going to look like we landed the World Series champs.

And people thought the new ball yard might sit vacant for much of the year. Heck, just to show the Windy City there's no hard feelings, we'll let the Cubs play in old Wrigley Field when our shiny new stadium is playing host to the College World Series.

After all . . . it's the World Series! Gotta hold on to that.

I mean, it's not like the Cubs will bring one home to Omaha any time soon.

If they can blow up the Trib. . . .

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Journalists: Enemies of the state.

Obviously, George W. Bush and the National Security Agency figured the ink-stained wretches would do to the "homeland" what they've managed to do to newspapers.

The effectiveness of journalists' demolition training is demonstrated by MSNBC's Keith Olbermann -- and not the Times or the Post or the Tribune -- being the one to ferret out allegations that reporters were the target of America's super-secret spy agency . . . right along with al Qaida.

MEANWHILE, there's this floating around out there, as reported by the Telegraph in London:

Manfred Nowak, the UN's special rapporteur on torture, called on the US authorities to pursue the former president and his former defence secretary for the treatment of prisoners held at the Guantanamo Bay camp in Cuba.

"Judicially speaking, the United States has a clear obligation," he told German television.

He said that the US had ratified the UN convention on torture which requires "all means, particularly penal law" to be used to bring proceedings against those violating it.

"We have all these documents that are now publicly available that prove that these methods of interrogation were intentionally ordered by Rumsfeld," Mr Nowak claimed.

"But obviously the highest authorities in the United States were aware of this."

Mr Bush left office on Tuesday as Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States at his inauguration ceremony in Washington.

Asked about the prospects of legal action being brought against Mr Bush and Mr Rumsfeld, Mr Nowak said: "In principle yes. I think the evidence is on the table."

At issue, however, is whether "American law will recognise these forms of torture", he added.

A bipartisan Senate report released last month found Mr Rumsfeld and other senior Bush administration officials responsible for the abuse of Guantanamo detainees.

Gimme a T! Gimme an I! Gimme a G! Gimme an E! Gimme an R! Gimme an S! What's that spell? L-S-U!

Yeah, this is going to turn out well.

Why doesn't Louisiana just quit prolonging its misery and tell the Dutchtown Boy to pull his damn finger out of the levee?

Read this from The Advocate . . . or -- after everybody gets through destroying the state's universities and community colleges -- Thee Addvokit:

The Governor’s Office is asking Louisiana colleges to prepare for potentially huge budget cuts approaching 30 percent of the state’s funding for higher education.

This worst-case scenario could mean laying off thousands of employees, adopting four-day school weeks, eliminating academic programs, tuition increases and cutting into merit-based TOPS scholarship funds, higher education leaders said Wednesday.

“It’s a sobering time,” said Sally Clausen, state commissioner of higher education, of the second round of budget cuts following mid-fiscal year slashes just weeks ago.

Plans for how the campuses make those cuts are due Jan. 30 for the 2009-2010 fiscal year that begins July 1.

LSU’s main campus alone could be in line for as much as $71 million in cuts, Chancellor Michael Martin said.

“I think it shoots a huge hole in the side of the flagship,” Martin said. “And I’m not sure we have the pumps to handle it.”

At the very worst for LSU: “Total loss of employment— faculty and nonfaculty — well over 1,000 jobs for sure,” Martin said.

Southern University is considering a four-day school week in addition to layoffs and furloughs, said Provost Mwalimu Shujaa.

The state Office of Planning and Budget presented a range of $212 million to $382 million in possible cuts to colleges for the upcoming fiscal year.

Louisiana strikes again

Everything may be up to date in Kansas City, but it didn't even take a day after the inauguration of our first black president for Louisiana to reassert itself as the closest thing this country has to a Jurassic Park for crackers.

ONE WOULD THINK it'd be hard to top political consultant Mike Bayham's dismissing the Rev. Joseph Lowery -- co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and dean of the civil-rights movement -- as a clown:

I had a ticket to go, but my attitude was “been there, done that” during President George W. Bush’s two inaugurations. I would have probably been beaten, or to use the Old Testament manner of executing non-believers, stoned to death for erupting in laughter after the circus clown…I mean preacher…delivered his benediction, but more on that latter in this column.

(snip)

And then there was the money shot: not Barack HUSSEIN Obama’s inaugural address, but the closing prayer of Reverend Joseph Lowrey in which he ended it with a crude nursery rhyme that asked brown to stick around, the red man to get ahead, yellow to be mellow and, my favorite and what caused me to almost fall off the treadmill, for white to embrace what is right.

It was good to see the Reverend Jeremiah Wright was there in spirit if not in body. Nothing like spitting in the faces of white folks whose support was instrumental in putting Barack Obama in the Oval Office.

THERE'S NOTHING LIKE playing the racial-grievance game, only to prove the point to which you object. Oh . . . and it wasn't a nursery rhyme. It was the blues -- Big Bill Broonzy's "Black, Brown and White," to be exact.

And nothing says "circus clown" like the resumé of Joseph Lowery.

One of the organizers, with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. Co-founder of the SCLC with King. Organizer of the Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965.

Yeah, what a clown. And I guess the civil-rights movement was just a joke, right?

Republicans are such an erudite, tolerant and even-tempered bunch -- and none more so than Louisiana Republicans. I can't understand how it is they'll end up relegated to the sidelines of politics for years and years.

OF COURSE, the blog rantings of a cracker politico is jes' a warm up act in such a stet as the Gret Stet. The main "Fergit, hell" act came Wednesday in Baton Rouge, as chronicled by The Advocate:

State and federal authorities are investigating an incident in which a twine noose was found Wednesday morning on a black employee’s chair at the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.

“This type of hateful behavior and hateful crime will not be tolerated,” said Mark Cooper, the agency’s director, during an afternoon news conference.

Cooper dubbed the noose a “gross violation of an individual’s right to work in a safe and positive environment.”

A female supervisor and her male coworker, both black, found the miniature noose, Cooper said.

Both were “rattled” by the discovery, he said.

State Police Superintendent Col. Mike Edmonson said at the news conference two State Police detectives and an FBI agent are interviewing everyone who had access to the office on Florida Boulevard.

Cooper said Wednesday was Homeland Security employees’ first day in their new offices after moving into a two-story office building from the four-story office next door.

The noose, which measures 8 inches long and 5 to 6 inches wide, was placed sometime between late Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning, Edmonson said.

OFFICIALS SAY there's no evidence of a link to Obama's inauguration but, given the timing, how could there not be?

It would make just about as much sense as saying there's no evidence of a link between disproportionate numbers of crackers, a lingering antipathy to the notion that "all men are created equal" and the state's permanent residency at the bottom of everything.

We are overcoming

You know, I was watching the inauguration today and thinking about Janice Grigsby.

And I started crying. By the time the Rev. Joseph Lowery -- the old lion of the civil-rights movement -- got out of his wheelchair and up to the rostrum to deliver the benediction, the tears were streaming down my face.

GOD BLESS HIM, at this moment, President Obama's politics are irrelevant. And my quite eclectic politics are irrelevant, and the evil (grin) Republicans' politics are irrelevant.

What's relevant is that I lived to see something -- something positive, at least -- that was unthinkable even 30 years ago.

What's relevant is that Barack Obama has overcome . . . that I have overcome . . . that, God willing, we have overcome.

I found myself wishing that Janice Grigsby would knock on my door so that I could give her a big, fat kiss on the lips, pick her up and spin her around and around.

Because the bastards didn't win, after all.

1963: A tale of two cities

I know fellow pro-lifers who are so verklempt about the pro-choice Barack Obama becoming president that they're going on a "media fast" this week.

Count me out. In other words, count me in the viewing audience when Obama becomes the 44th president of the United States.

I wish the incoming president well. I am praying for him.

LIKEWISE, I am praying that Obama might come to understand that the sort of bodily "autonomy" for some that can deny others the right to be born -- the very right to exist -- is a philosophical body blow to all that made it possible for him to become the first African-American to take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. And not only that, but a mortal blow to a political and spiritual metamorphosis that has allowed our new president even to be regarded as a human being . . . with all the rights and sanctity that accompany one's humanity.

That a black man could be regarded as a true human being wasn't always a given -- not even in my lifetime. When I was born in Baton Rouge, La., in March 1961, affording people of color all the rights and privileges of American citizenship was a flat-out ludicrous proposition.

And Louisiana, along with a host of other Southern states, went to the wall to preserve that wicked status quo.

WHAT AN AMAZING JOURNEY from then to now. To the inauguration of a black man as president -- as de facto leader of the free world. Despite our serious disagreements with soon-to-be President Obama on abortion, pro-lifers especially ought to rejoice in where that journey has taken us thus far.

We should praise the Almighty for the world of difference between Jan. 20, 2009, and the late fall of 1963, when I was not quite 4 and Barack Obama had just turned 3.

To illustrate how far that remarkable national journey has brought us -- and we're still not yet where we need to be -- it might be useful to review the tale of two cities. One would be Omaha, Neb., where I live now. The other would be my hometown, Baton Rouge.

Here's some of an article from the Dec. 17, 1963, issue of Look magazine. The headline:

THE NEGRO FACES NORTH

OMAHA, NEBRASKA:
THE NEW MOOD
SHOCKS THE CITY

BY SAM CASTAN
LOOK SENIOR EDITOR

Omaha, Nebr., has an easy-going temperament. The people who get along best there learned long ago that you don't ask for anything outright until you've passed the time of day. So Omaha was scarcely ready for the Negro Summer Revolt of 1963, and most folks were plumb shook when it hit.

"Why here?" many asked. Omaha has had a Negro state senator for years. One of the town's most prominent surgeons is Dr. Claude Organ, a Negro, who had no difficulty getting office space in the Medical Arts Building downtown. Negroes hold well-paying jobs in the packinghouses, Omaha's main industry. There are colored bus drivers, mail carriers and policemen. Mayor James Dworak in July set up a biracial committee of top-level white and Negro leaders to investigate and resolve alleged discrimination in housing, jobs, etc.

Why then, in the summer of 1963, did pray-ins, sit-ins, picket lines and threats of a boycott disturb the social and economic tranquillity of a solid town like Omaha?

"This town is sick, that's why," says the Rev. James T. Stewart, director of Social Action for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Omaha. "I'm not speaking of open sores, either — nothing as simple as the ghetto on the 'Near North Side,' where all but a handful of 30,000 Omaha Negroes live. No, our sickness is in the bloodstream — in our inner posture. We are an undemocratic city."

"It's worse than that," declares a Negro, the Rev. Kelsey Jones, pastor of the Cleaves Temple (Christian Methodist Episcopal Church). "There's no place Negroes can turn without being denied right of access. No house, no school, no job opportunity —except for those in the Near North Side, or the 'Neighborhood,' as we call it."

Last May, the Rev. Mr. Jones and several other young ministers formed the 4CL, or Citizens' Coordinating Committee for Civil Liberties. "They barged into my office," angrily recalls Mayor Dworak, "with a series of outrageous demands. I offered to appoint one of them, the Rev. Rudolph McNair, to my biracial citizens' committee. Apparently, that wasn't enough, because they picketed the very first meeting of the committee. We won't stand for that here in Omaha."

Made up of Omaha's most influential citizens, the Mayor's Bi-racial Committee claims it is carefully laying the groundwork for the correction of Negro complaints. Says Morris E. Jacobs, a prosperous Omaha businessman and one of the leaders of the committee, "We're trying to set up an ideal that can serve as an example for the whole United States. And what happens? They picket! I got wind of it beforehand, and phoned Reverend McNair. I said. 'We didn't know about your grievances. Now that you've made them known, give us a chance to settle things and redeem ourselves with dignity — don't crowd us.'

(snip)

A handful of men control most of Omaha's money and businesses and set the city's political, social and moral climate. Almost everyone agrees that atop this small pyramid sits Peter Kiewit, the personable, easy-going native Omahan who presides over Peter Kiewit Sons' Co., one of the nation's largest construction firms. Kiewit, with Morris Jacobs, heads the employment subcommittee of the Mayor's biracial group. "We called in the heads of Omaha's 125 largest businesses," he says. "We requested more jobs for Negroes and complete cooperation in the Mayor's project. Jobs will be coming — we already have pledges from the business community.

"As for housing, I've seen little solid proof that Negroes want to move away from their own neighborhood. I happen to know that 135 FHA-owned houses are up for grabs in Omaha; each of these medium-priced houses is available to anyone who wants it. Not one Negro has applied. In time, I feel, as their leaders prepare them for better jobs and higher educational goals, many will apply. I don't think that certain activities of the 4CL are going to help at all. These demonstrations are bound to cause resentment, and there is a real danger that harassment and intimidation of businessmen will hinder or even set back their cause."

Between the urgent militants of the 4CL and the plodding moderates of the Mayor's Bi-racial Committee stands a Negro, Dr.. Claude Organ. Texas-born Organ, 36, and the father of six, is a distinguished academic surgeon, a professor of surgery at Creighton University, president of Omaha's Urban League and on the board of the Catholic Interracial Council. Organ lives in two worlds — the white one owned and operated by Omaha's power elite, and the black one enclosed within his skin. He has managed both skillfully.

It was Dr. Organ who, early last year, suggested to members of the Negro Ministerial Alliance that the time was right for a more concerted push than either the Urban League or the Omaha branch of the NAACP was equipped to make. The result was the 4CL, which splintered off to become the most active arm of Negro leadership in town. Organ himself, as a man deeply respected by both whites and Negroes in Omaha, is a member of the Mayor's Bi-racial Committee. "I know some people say I wear two hats. I just do what I can," he says.

In Omaha, the rules of the race game are known to everyone. Alfred C. Kennedy, the city's leading realtor, has said that he would inquire about property for a Negro buyer in a white neighborhood, but would not participate in the closing of the deal or accept any commission, to protect his firm against possible reprisals.

Daniel J. Monen, chairman of the Mayor's biracial housing subcommittee, adds, "I've run into a damned lot of inflamed white people." He urges his group to avoid extremism.

Thus, the ghetto way of life goes on in Omaha, and Negroes there grow increasingly impatient.

Peter Kiewit and Morris Jacobs have become special targets of the 4CL. In early September, Kiewit's newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald, was silently ringed by picketing members of the group, which accused the World-Herald of employment bias and slanted reporting.

Jacobs called the demonstration "unfair," but Omaha Public Safety Director Chris Gugas, who had threatened to invoke the city ruling that prohibits unlicensed demonstrations, made no arrests.

According to Elizabeth Davis Pittman, an attractive Negro attorney. "The powers in this city are not so much angry as they are resentful because it is their consciences that are being picketed."

Those consciences are getting a workout. Though there is comparatively little social interaction between whites and Negroes in Omaha, the town's ordinary Negroes, so long docile and silent, have begun to speak out, now that the 4CL has prodded white Omahans into listening.

Last summer, when Omaha school superintendent Dr. Paul Miller cited "126 Negroes" in the school system, Mrs. Mildred Brownell challenged, "One hundred and twenty-six teachers?" As it turned out, the figure 126 included some 78 teachers; the rest were employed in custodial and other nonprofessional jobs.

Signs of change are small but promising. Sixteen Omaha clergymen of various faiths last July issued a "statement of purpose for action and a basis for involvement." Laymen, too. are beginning to see the problem as basically a moral one. A white newspaper reporter confides. "We've let ourselves be led by men who are business leaders — people who stress land values, property values, aesthetics — none of which have allowed us, so far, to see the reality of the Omaha Negro's plight. Well. we can't avoid seeing it now."

NOW, HERE'S WHAT it was like 1,000 miles to the south. From an article in Monday's edition of The (Baton Rouge) Advocate:

“When Obama takes the oath of office on Tuesday, part of Dr. King’s dream will be realized — we are finally judging a person by his character and not by the color of his skin,” said Freya Anderson Rivers.

Rivers, 62, principal of a Michigan elementary school, was one of four black students to integrate Baton Rouge’s Lee High School in 1963.

“So many people died and suffered to get Obama where he is today,” Rivers said. “What if we’d never had the bus boycott and Dr. King hadn’t come to Baton Rouge to find out how we’d been so successful, would we be where we are today? I don’t think we would.”

(snip)

Now with Obama’s election, those involved in the civil rights movement say the suffering they endured to change the law of the land and to change people’s hearts and minds was worth it.

“For so many years, I didn’t think that it was,” Rivers said. “But now I know our suffering was not in vain. I have hope that the country is changing. For years I refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance, but I started saying it again the day after Obama was elected.”

In August 1963, Rivers planned to attend the March on Washington where King gave his famous “I Have A Dream” speech.

“But we had to cancel the trip when the school district said I had to register for school on the same day as the march,” she said.

Rivers, who was a 16-year-old senior at the time, was one of four students — all of whom had top grades and came from stable families — to integrate Lee High School.

And that year of school was a harrowing, nightmarish experience, she said.

“The four of us were pushed and shoved when we walked down the hallways, we were called names, the other kids spit on us, and when we sat down at a desk in a classroom, all of the other students moved away,” she said.

When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, U.S. marshals, who feared for the Lee High School Four’s safety, removed the students from school that day.

“As the marshals tried to get us out of the school, a mob surrounded us. The teachers and the marshals had to encircle us to get us to the car,” Rivers said.

As they pulled away from the school, someone threw a bucket of feces and urine at the car, she said.

A first-chair clarinetist at her former school, Southern High School, Rivers had to fight to get to play in the Lee High School band.

When Rivers won a gold medal for a clarinet solo at a state competition, her name was never announced with the other winners’ names.

And Rivers brought her mother to tears during one graduation activity.

“Everyone was walking out in pairs,” the high school honor graduate said. “But no one would walk with me. So, I stood there until everyone else walked out and then I walked out alone like a bride. The crowd booed me.”

Rivers said she will attend Obama’s inauguration.

“You couldn’t keep me away,” she said. “I missed the March on Washington and I plan to make that up by going to the inauguration. There’s a lot of justice to that.”

YES, there is.

War is all hell

A Hebrew-speaking Palestinian doctor and peace activist is on the phone with an Israeli correspondent, on live television.

SUDDENLY, two Israeli tank shells rip into his house in Gaza. The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. picks up the story from there:

"My daughters!" he screamed. "Oh, God, my daughters!"

Three of his daughters and a niece were killed.

Abu al-Aish had been planning to take his family and start fresh in Canada, but no one in crowded Gaza or nearby Israeli towns was immune to shells or rockets during the conflict, which left than 1,200 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead.

Less than 24 hours before Israel announced its ceasefire in its assault on Hamas, his daughters and niece were killed by Israeli fire.

Gazan officials identified his dead daughters as 22-year-old Bisan, 15-year-old Mayer and 14-year-old Aya, and the niece as 14-year-old Nour Abu al-Aish, the Associated Press reported.

Eighteen members of his extended family were in the house at the time, and at least two of his five surviving children were wounded in the shelling, AP said.

On television, the Israeli correspondent, [Shlomi] Eldar, choked up as the doctor's wails were broadcast across the nation.

WELCOME TO the Old Testament vs. the Koran. Welcome to a world where Jesus is, at best, a prophet who didn't get the last word. That, or a nut and a blasphemer. Do you recall that "love your enemies" crap from Matthew, Chapter 5?

43
"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'
44
But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you,
45
that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
46
For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same?
47
And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same?
48
So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.

THAT'S NOT OPERATIVE in the Holy Land, at least for the vast majority of folks who live there. No, this is more like it:

Remember, LORD, against Edom that day at Jerusalem. They said: "Level it, level it down to its foundations!"

Fair Babylon, you destroyer, happy those who pay you back the evil you have done us!

Happy those who seize your children and smash them against a rock.

And, alas, this:

Allah's Apostle said, "The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. "O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him."

WELCOME to a Town, a Territory, a Region Without Pity.

Its agony will end when "the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a mighty roar and the elements will be dissolved by fire, and the earth and everything done on it will be found out."

Radio: High-fiving a blind guy

Ryan Seacrest is a fitting poster boy for his employer, Clear Channel Communications.

For Seacrest, trying to high-five a blind guy is what he really does on his American Idol gig. For Clear Channel, the biggest of broadcasting's corporate behemoths, trying to high-five a blind guy is only an apt metaphor of how they run their radio stations.

PRACTICALLY AND METAPHORICALLY, it's not going to work so well.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Clear Channel Communications Inc. plans to lay off about 7% of its U.S. staff and replace more local shows with syndicated content, moves that could affect the broader radio and outdoor-advertising businesses for years to come.

Tuesday, Clear Channel will lay off about 1,500 employees, mostly in ad sales, and implement other cuts aimed at saving close to $400 million, according to a person familiar with the situation. The company, which employs about 20,000 people in the U.S., declined to comment.

(snip)

On the radio side, the company is likely to eliminate chunks of local programming and replace it with national programming, much as it has brought Ryan Seacrest's Los Angeles-based radio show to other markets in recent months. If a local show seems successful, the company will try to syndicate it faster than it might have in the past, a person familiar with the situation said.

CAN YOU IMAGINE? Ryan Seacrest on station after station after station. It's going to be like trying to find something other than Rush Limbaugh -- or Rush wannabes -- on AM radio from 11 to 2.

Only with overresearched, underwhelming Top-40 music.

Wash, rinse, find a Ryan Seacrest for each format, repeat. God Almighty.

HAT TIP: Your Right Hand Thief.

An inelegant crime-prevention tool

A 9 millimeter handgun will lose a pissing match with an SKS assault rifle every time.

And thus, Omaha finds itself with two fewer common hoodlums on the mean streets -- a duo who picked a fight with a better-armed shopkeeper and ended up dead.

Why? All because they were upset about some gold teefuses they'd ordered from a grillz-and-bling joint.

YOU WANT TO KNOW why newspaper reporters drink? Because they have to -- day in and day out -- write about mind-boggling deviance and stupidity, and they have to do it with the print version of a straight face.

Consider this Omaha World-Herald story today:

The store owner who shot and killed two men Tuesday night won't face charges because he was defending himself after being shot at by one of them, Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine said Friday.

Kleine said Marcel Davis, 16, and Willie Wakefield, 29, were upset about some jewelry that had been ordered from Andre McKesson, owner of Midwest Grillz & Jewelry at 6209 Ames Ave.

Brandon Boyce, a friend of Davis and Wakefield, said he, the two men and a fourth man drove to the store about 10 p.m. Tuesday to pick up a decorative mouthpiece known as a grill.

Boyce said that Davis and Wakefield went inside the store and that McKesson locked the door behind them. Boyce waited outside.

Boyce, 22, said Thursday that he could hear the men inside, arguing.

He recalled hearing, "Why you playing games with us, man? Where's our teeth? Can you give a refund? Then give me my teeth!"

During the argument, Kleine said, Wakefield pulled a 9 mm handgun and fired at least two shots at McKesson.

One of those bullets lodged in the wall above where McKesson had been standing. Two 9 mm cartridge casings were found in the store, Kleine said.

McKesson grabbed an SKS semiautomatic rifle he kept at the counter and fired 10 to 15 rounds at Wakefield and Davis, killing them, Kleine said.

IF YOU ASK ME, this sad story illustrates the rank tragedy of a minority underclass managing to do to itself what the Klan never could have accomplished at its pointy-hooded, malevolent zenith. How do you get to a point of such sociological deviance that you're willing to kill or be killed over ugly-ass gold dental adornments?

What level of familial and societal dysfunction produces such an animal -- one for whom the next logical step after "Where's our teeth? Can you give a refund" is to pull a 9 millimeter and start busting caps?

Thank God for thugs with about as much pistol skillz as brains. And for shopkeepers with better weaponry . . . and better aim.

(Not that honkies like me ought to feel superior for being, on average, marginally less violent . . . at least when it comes to disputes over gold teefuses. Every day, in every way, we're getting there. We're getting there. Hell . . . oftentimes, we ARE there.)

IT SHOULDN'T come to this.

William Wakefield and Marcel Davis Jr. ought to have had better upbringing, better opportunities and a fair shot at life. (No pun intended.) They ought to have been born into a world of order and nurture.

They ought to have lived in a milieu where the classroom held more appeal than the streets.

They ought to have been born into a country where "No child left behind" was more than a slogan. And where, failing that, the criminal-justice system was more than a crook-recycling program.

But they weren't . . . and didn't.

Damned sad, that.

WHAT HAPPENED on Tuesday night was a messy, bloody, horrendous and tragic solution to the problem of a pair of common thugs incapable of working and playing well with others.

Being that it was the only solution at hand -- and given the abject failure of all the others -- I suppose we should be happy with what we can get. That would be two dead crooks instead of one dead shopkeeper.

Happy. . . .

Zippity freakin' doo dah.

Lord have mercy on the dead . . . and on we the living.

3 Chords & the Truth: Change has come

You can mark the coming of "change" to Washington by watching this video over and over and over again.

That would be a serious mistake. Perhaps a fatal mistake.

OR . . . YOU CAN take note of the inauguration of our new president, Barack Obama, by checking out this week's episode of 3 Chords & the Truth. I would strongly recommend this second option but, after all, it is your choice.

Just make sure you choose wisely. Is what I'm saying, Cap.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

I miss the '60s: Part 2,347

The great thing about the 1960s was that society hadn't completely fragmented yet . . . and you had only a few TV channels from which to choose.

That meant you still had things like variety shows on the tube -- the Kraft Music Hall, preserved here from 1967, for example. It also meant you had these wonderfully awkward mashups like Jack Benny introducing, then interviewing, the Blues Magoos.

Oh . . . don't watch this video if you have some sort of seizure disorder. It's '60s psychedelic TV production at its finest.

Flick lives!!!

The Omaha World-Herald has confirmed something far more exciting than the likelihood of life on Mars.

THE INTREPID journalists of the city's daily newspaper have -- Can I get a drum roll here? Thanks -- the intrepid scriveners of Nebraska's largest daily have discovered Flick in Omaha! Can Ralphie and Skut Farkas be far behind?

The tall metal light pole was irresistible in the early morning subzero temperatures.

Mason Mulick had walked past it countless times before; he'd considered it; he'd been counseled against it.

But Thursday, on Omaha's coldest day this winter, the 6-year-old gave in.

He opened his mouth, leaned into the pole and unwittingly recreated a modern Christmas classic in an Omaha neighborhood near 164th and Pacific Streets. When Mason's little tongue touched metal, it stuck.

Arms flailed, Mason screamed, and the neighborhood kids waiting for the car pool crowded around, yelling: "His tongue's stuck on the light pole! His tongue's stuck on the light pole!"

His panicked mother, Laci Mulick, looked outside and saw Mason's predicament. In seconds, she was out there too — in her pajamas with two glasses of water.

A neighbor poured the first glass of water.

Still stuck.

With Mason and his twin sister, Darby, wailing, his mom poured two more glasses, freeing Mason but leaving behind traces of Mason's tongue.

SEE? THAT'S WHAT happens when you're only 6.

When you're 6, you just don't have any mastery of technique yet. The kid just went into this tongue-on-light-pole thing like a dimwitted bull in a china shop.

I'll bet he put his whole tongue on that pole. Please. Kid, it was 16 below!

And I'll bet the little twerp just left it on there, too. It was bound to get hopelessly stuck. Novices . . . sheesh!

AT THESE temperatures -- I mean, we're talking full-fledged mid-January Arctic blast here -- technique is everything. If you don't have your technique down pat, we're talking stuck tongue . . . kids abandoning you to icy death just because the bell rings . . . and, finally, the fire department showing up to save everything but your pride.

Technique, technique, technique. Learn it. Live it. Love it.

OK . . . we're talking double digits below zero. No other option but a little . . . and quick. Kind of like when your mom makes you kiss your aunt.

The light pole is your aunt . . . if not your sister. Remember it! What's the light pole?

That's right -- aunt. Maybe sister.

SO . . . the key to extreme-cold pole licking is to use just the very tip of your tongue. No more than an eighth-of-an-inch swath.

And just as importantly, you gotta be quick. Touching that teeniest tip of the tongue to said light pole for more than a half-second -- one second at the outside . . . and I wouldn't wager on you emerging able to speak clearly at a second -- is a recipe for sheer disaster. Ask Flick. Or Mason.

Disaster. Abandonment . . . fire trucks . . . humiliation . . . yadda yadda yadda.

There's a right way and a wrong way to do everything. Forget that, and you just as well send the video in to Jackass.

Everything farts

NASA is so grateful there has been -- thus far -- no extraterrestrial distributor of Beano.

AFTER ALL, if whatever's on Mars had taken Beano before, there'd be no gas for researchers to find on the red (bean?) planet. The Associated Press has the straight poop:

A surprising and mysterious belch of methane gas on Mars hints at possible microbial life underground, but also could come from changes in rocks, a new NASA study found. The presence of methane on Mars could be significant because by far most of the gas on Earth is a byproduct of life — from animal digestion and decaying plants and animals.

Past studies indicated no regular methane on Mars. But new research using three ground-based telescopes confirmed that nearly 21,000 tons of methane were released during a few months of the late summer of 2003, according to a study published Thursday in the online edition of the journal Science.

"This raises the probability substantially that life was there or still survives at the present," study author Michael Mumma of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center told The Associated Press.

But Mumma also said claims of life need far more evidence and this isn't nearly enough. By 2006, most of the methane had disappeared from the Martian atmosphere, adding to the mystery of the gas, he said.

The Mars belch is similar to what comes out of the waters near Santa Barbara, Calif., which comes from decaying life in the sea floor. Microbes in the Arctic and other extreme Earth environments that don't use oxygen still release methane and they have been examples of the type of life astronomers look for on other planets.

Mumma and other scientists said NASA is likely to tinker with its long-held method of looking for life on Mars by seeking water and concentrating on signs of long-gone life. Instead NASA should think about methane hotspots as a "bull's-eye" for future missions and search for present-day life below the surface, said Indiana University geologist Lisa Pratt, who spoke during a NASA press conference. She was not involved in the research.

That's because methane is not only a waste product of life, it can be a food for other life, which makes these temporary methane hotspots good places to explore, Pratt said. She said it was "slightly more plausible" that the methane came from some form of life than geological changes.

ON THE OTHER HAND, wouldn't it be a bummer if we sent a future Mars probe to the source of the methane emissions . . . only to find Joan Rivers?

Baby got dead. We're so shocked.

Baby will be wearing his grillz to his own funeral.

His mama says Marcel Davis Jr., 16, was picking up a set of dental bling when he got gunned down at a north Omaha grillz and jewelry emporium. He was planning to wear them to the funeral of an incompetent armed robber.

What some say -- and what the cops aren't saying -- suggests there's a lot more to the story.

But what is incontrovertible is that if Baby had had a crappy lawyer a year and change ago, he'd be alive right now. In November 2007, Davis had been charged as an adult after allegedly pointing a stolen handgun at an Omaha police officer he was fleeing.

The cop shot him in the leg. Tuesday night, somebody had better aim.

Between assault and using a firearm to commit a felony, the teen could have been in jail a long, long time. Instead, ace defense attorney Bill Gallup got the case assigned to juvenile court, and young Davis recently emerged from the Douglas County Juvenile Detention Center.

AND NOW he and a 29-year-old are dead after going to fetch some grillz, it says in today's Omaha World-Herald:

Marcel Davis, a Northwest High School sophomore, planned to wear his new grill at a funeral today, a great aunt said.

Instead, the family is mourning his death after police met with his mother outside the shooting scene this morning and confirmed what relatives already knew — Davis was shot to death at the Midwest Grillz & Jewelry store just before 10:30 p.m.

William J. “Willie” Wakefield, 29, also was killed at the store, police said. Davis’s great aunt said her nephew had gone to Midwest Grillz with an older friend. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Wakefield was that friend.

A third person was being treated at Creighton University Medical Center for a gunshot wound suffered at the scene, 6209 Ames Ave. Brandon Boyce, 22, of Omaha, walked into the hospital about a half hour after the shooting.

Police would not say what connection any of the three have to the shooting. Police also would not give details about what happened inside the store.

Preliminary police dispatch reports centered on a robbery attempt. Police today said they were seeking no suspects and had made no arrests.

(snip)

Her nephew planned to wear it to the funeral today of a man killed while committing a robbery a couple weeks back, his aunt said.

Kyles said her nephew would not have been part of a robbery. He had been in trouble, she said, but he didn’t rob.

NO, HE JUST rode around in stolen cars and pulled stolen guns on Omaha cops. But noooo. . . .

"'Yeah, he got into some trouble, all kids do that, but as far as anything, he’s a good boy,'” Baby's mama, Alethea Goynes, told WOWT television today. “'He don’t want for nothing, he don’t steal from nobody or nothing.'"

It's never the little darling's fault, is it? No matter how long the rap sheet.

But if the store owner's father is giving KMTV television the straight scoop, Baby either was in the wrong place at exactly the wrong time, or he decided to add armed robbery to his repertoire . . . and it didn't work out.

The store's owner Andre McKesson tells his family three men came into the store about 10:30, one had a gun. McKesson claims he fired at the three men to save his own life. McKesson's father Flynn Franklin tells Action 3 News, "He was just trying to protect himself. Three guys tried to rob him and two got shot." Omaha Police have not confirmed the family's account of what may have happened in the store; police have said they are not looking for a suspect.

A YEAR and change ago, Goynes thought everything might work out for her baby boy:

"I hope he gets back on track and does the right thing," Goynes said. "I think this scared him. Hopefully, when it's all over, he can get back on track and go back to school and be the boy I know he is."

HE DIDN'T. In this case, you not only can cut the irony with a knife, you can slice it six ways from Sunday.

At any rate, all that counts now is that Marcel Davis Jr. died the boy we knew him to be -- the boy he was doomed to be through (lack of) nurture and (a deviant) popular culture. That's a tragedy.

And given how the Mother of the Year acted at one of Baby's hearings in late 2007, his funeral will be anything but dull.

Mad-radio disease

Ernie Pyle, the great Scripps Howard war correspondent, put human faces to the carnage of a world gone mad.

LIKEWISE, Inside Music Media's Jerry Del Colliano does the same as he gathers testimony from the killing fields of an industry -- an entire communications medium -- gone bat-s*** crazy. Say goodbye to radio:

After 30 years on KRNT-AM, Des Moines, Saga Communications decided to fire popular personality Steve Gibbons. I'm thinking -- his salary was too costly. How about you? Anyway, news accounts say he got off the air at 10 one morning and by 10:10 he was in his new bosses' office getting his ass fired. He was two years away from retirement.

Meanwhile, Jeff Delvaux, who had been working in the market for Saga for only two weeks, apparently got his marching orders from the Boss Kahuna -- CEO Ed Christian in Detroit.

For consolidated radio, just another slay in paradise, except for one thing.

Gibbons has been waiting for a kidney transplant for two years. He's on dialysis 12 hours a week just to stay alive. Dialysis, as some of you may know, puts a burden on one's strength making it tough to recover from these lifesaving sessions. And Gibbons has a long wait for a new kidney because he is a tough match for a transplant because his blood type is 0-negative.

On the way out the door, Gibbons showed the class he's always had by not blaming the station or even the new General Robot -- I mean, manager.

Look, I'm not trying to tell Saga how to run their company. I'm really not. If they want to replace an asset like Gibbons that badly to save a few coins, it's their station.

But what kind of a message is Ed Christian, the grumpy old CEO who seems to have forgotten what it's like to be compassionate, sending to other surviving Saga employees?

The guy's been working at the station for 30 frickin' years. How about one year of pay and plenty of notice?

Saga, known to be cheap, may not have been able to handle that -- so how about 30 days notice and some pay?

30 minutes notice -- instead of ten?

What price, loyalty?

THERE ARE SOME stupid listeners out there, which accounts for the audiences of at least a few Omaha radio stations. But not all listeners are stupid.

Those non-mouth-breathing folks -- and the haste with which they're making for the emergency exits -- explains the pickle the radio industry finds itself in today. And the ones who haven't yet given up on something that's been a part of American life since 1920 are smart enough to know that anybody who treats a sick employee like he's a flaming bag of dog doo isn't going to treat listeners any better.

Click.

Everything is on YouTube

Somebody, back in the 1950s, recorded WJR off of the Detroit radio on what was an antiquated piece of equipment even then . . . a home disc recorder. And today, that scratchy old recording has shown up on YouTube, allowing the analog past to meet the digital future.

What a country!

Here we go loop-de-loop

Long ago and far away, I learned about all the cool tunes on the radio.

That rarely happens anymore. And if it does, it's because I'm listening to a station on the Internet . . . one Not From Around Here. More than likely these days, I hear about exciting artists on blogs, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace.

AND SOME ARTISTS I have heard of but never actually heard until stumbling upon a YouTube posted on a blog. New Orleans artist Theresa Andersson, a fortuitous arrival from Sweden 18 years ago, falls into that category.

My bad . . . and my loss. Until now.

Bought the album on iTunes. Bought two albums on iTunes, actually.

Enjoy the video -- the amazing video when you realize what she's up to . . . you just watch carefully -- which she recorded in her Crescent City kitchen. In fact, that's exactly where Andersson recorded her entire 2008 album, "Hummingbird, Go!"

HAT TIP: Alive and Young.

Grace In the Key of Charles

I've become hooked on the most extraordinary radio program. I had to go to Canada to find it.

FORTUNATELY, living here in Nebraska, it's easy enough to pick up on 990 AM -- the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. out of Winnipeg. And fortunately for everybody out of radio range, all of the CBC's regional feeds are streamed on the Internet.

The program, you ask? It's In the Key of Charles, with Montreal singer/songwriter/pianist/actor Gregory Charles. The program's premise, simplement, is this: Charles sits in his living room, at his piano, and plays CDs -- music spanning every possible genre -- centered on a broad theme.

Between the songs, he carries on a conversation with the listener. Every now and again, he'll tickle the ivories and sing something himself.

It's magic, and it's addictive.

YOU'LL FIND NOTHING like it on American radio, I don't think. Not even public radio, which -- unfortunately -- tends to want to make every damn thing sound academic . . . or at least "inside baseball," if you get my drift.

We don't need corporate radio programmed by HAL 9000. We don't always need to be overtly "educated," either.

What we so desperately need today is communion. One person making a connection with another. One person making a personal connection with many.

People reaching out to fellow human beings.

WHAT WE NEED, especially in our media, is beauty and intelligence. Sadly, that is disappearing by the minute in our society.

Sometimes, though, we find moments of electronic grace. I found mine on the Canadian radio.