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Breathe deeply while you still can for free.

Soon enough, someone will find a way to make you pay a premium for clean air. And if you can't afford the good stuff, America . . . well, you can just kindly remove yourself to the back of the bus, where the "free market" makes "those people" sit.

Every day and in every way, the ranks of "those people" are swelling.

Take health care, for example. If you'd like some, it will cost you. If you'd like the good stuff, it will cost you a lot -- though you really can't afford the good stuff.

AND KNOW that to the extent the well-off opt for the "good stuff -- something we're coming to know as "concierge" care, where the doctor actually gives you the time of day . . . and his phone number -- what's left for the rest of us likely will come to resemble the scraps from the rich man's table.

According to Sunday's Omaha World-Herald, you can just call the vast majority of us Lazarus:

Imagine opening a letter like this from your doctor:

“I'd love to keep you as a patient, but to stay with me you'll have to pay an extra annual fee of $2,500.

“Please let my office know if you will be paying the fee. If not, we'll help you find another primary care doctor.”

Although it might be worded more politely, that's the gist of the letter you could receive if your doctor adopts a style of primary health care known as concierge medicine.

Its backers say the concept can attract and retain more primary care doctors by improving their lives and enabling them to practice medicine the way they want, rather than under the time-constrained demands of the typical doctor's office.

But the concept also raises philosophical and ethical issues. Concierge physicians limit the number of patients they see by charging annual fees, which wealthy people can more easily afford. Also, this kind of medicine could reduce the number of primary care doctors at a time when demand already exceeds supply.

Nationally, the practice of concierge medicine is still small — perhaps 400 primary care physicians out of about 250,000 nationally — but in some regions it is firmly established.

The largest concierge company, MDVIP, has more than 300 doctors nationwide and recently was purchased by Procter & Gamble. It's been more than 12 years since the first such practice opened in Seattle. There's even a cable TV program, “Royal Pains,” about concierge medicine.

But the approach has only recently arrived here. Nebraska's first, a two-doctor practice, opened last month near 90th Street and West Dodge Road in Omaha after a three-year trial at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

It's affiliated with a new Omaha management company, Members.MD, whose chairman is former Burger King franchise owner and cancer survivor Mike Simmonds.

“Primary care is broken,” said Dr. Joel Bessmer, who is medical director of Members.MD and who opened the new practice with partner Dr. Robert Schwab. “It allows us to step off the treadmill and spend time with patients. This is a different world of trying to provide primary care.”

Physicians get to know patients thoroughly and become their health partners, he said. The doctor's office becomes the patients' comfortable, easily accessible medical home, instead of a hurried place full of other sick people and doctors who have no time to spare.

But Dr. John Goodson of Harvard Medical School said concierge medicine could worsen a system that to some degree already dispenses care based on whether people can afford insurance.

“Do we as physicians hang together and maintain our commitment to access?” he said. “That really ought to be a fundamental principle of medicine. We're there to help people, and we're not going to discriminate against people because of their economics.”
Goodson said primary care doctors should supervise their patients' hospital stays as part of normal care, not for an extra fee. Members.MD offers hospital supervision only with its upper level of care.

Eliminating people from a medical practice by charging a fee is “abandonment,” he said. Even if a patient's records transfer, the new doctor doesn't know all the information that the first doctor learned about the patient.

Yet the rise of concierge care, he said, shows that as a profession, primary care “is on the ropes and dying fast. It's like the polar ice cap, starting to fracture. It ought to be a wake-up call to everybody.”

He said that the start of a practice in Omaha indicates the concierge model, although marginal in most regions, isn't going away. “It makes me sad as a professional that my colleagues are doing this sort of charging.”

WE NOW LIVE in a country where one's bank account determines one's worth in life. You are what you make. Human dignity has become a commodity.

"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"? Formerly available for free from one's Creator, they now are available only with purchase of the America Plus premium package.

If you don't want to die before the next operator is available to schedule your appointment with a Proletarian Partners physician's assistant, it's going to cost you. And you'd better hope your insurance plan allows diagnostic stethoscope use.

But that's not important now. What's important is that "concierge medicine" is the talk of the town -- the part of town that matters, that is:

Simmonds, who was inducted in the Omaha Business Hall of Fame last year for his success in the fast-food business, said the concept is “sort of the talk of the town, at least in my circles.”

Simmonds said he heard about Bessmer's practice from a fellow airplane traveler, called Bessmer the next morning, interviewed him over lunch at Charleston's and “hired him” as his doctor. Simmonds' former primary care doctor was good and even a friend, but Simmonds couldn't call or e-mail him whenever he wanted.

“When I don't feel good, I like to talk to somebody right now,” he said. “Joel spoiled me,” including supervising his care when he was hospitalized and providing other care over the past year and a half. He was diagnosed with cancer several years ago.

IF YOU BELIEVE it's a self-evident truth that "all men are created equal," you should be offended as hell right now. Some folk think their money makes their well-being more important than yours. They think that rationing isn't rationing if they slap a "free market" label on it and have enough cash to game the system in their favor.

There's a four-letter word for that kind of thinking: E-V-I-L.

And I think the Bolshevik Revolution happened for a reason. I hope people like Mike Simmonds have another think coming before finding out exactly what that reason was.

Us in 1929

When I arrived in North Platte, Neb., during the last gasps of winter in 1983, something struck me about the place -- especially as a native of the Deep South.

There weren't any black people to speak of. I mean, the place was as white as the snow on the ground.

AS IT turns out, there were reasons for that. I'd wager that something close to being chief among those reasons would be what happened Saturday, July 13, 1929. ("Darkies"? A newspaper in Prescott, Ariz., thought it respectable to use the word "darkies" in a headline -- or anywhere else? Really?)

The North Platte incident was especially eerie in light of what happened here in Omaha a decade earlier, on Sept. 28, 1919.

DON'T THINK we're much more civilized these days, and don't think there aren't groups out there ready and willing to play with fire in these "interesting times."

3 Chords & the Truth: Boogie wonderland

Enter dancing.

With the first signs of maybe there being a spring later this year, that's how we choose to enter this week's episode of 3 Chords & the Truth -- dancing. Stepping lively.

Getting down to the sounds.

Boogying, as it were.

AND WE GO from there on the Big Show. Personally, I think it's rather infectious. I bet you will, too.

Well, that's about all there is to say. If our musical excursion this week doesn't have your toe tapping and a smile on your face . . . you just may be John Mayer in a roomful of angry Jessica Simpsons. Or something like that.

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

Neo-nazi junk rebels against 'clean' Mayer

John Mayer, freshly tired of being an "a**hole," tells anybody who'll listen -- and folks had better, being that they paid, like, a bazillion dollars for the privilege -- that "It's a clean me now, people, clean me."

That well may be.

David Duke's c***, on the other hand, was spotted gettin' down and dirty at an Omaha strip club Wednesday night, a day before his show at the Qwest Center. Josefina Loza's story in this morning's Omaha World-Herald, however, didn't say whether Mayer knew where his neo-Nazi junk was hangin' all night:

Mayer — or someone who looks just like him — kicked it at The 20’s, an exotic dance club in midtown. He performed at the Qwest Center on Thursday.

Terry O’Halloran, longtime owner of Omaha bars — but not The 20’s — tipped me off in an e-mail: “Did you hear Mayer was allegedly at The 20’s last night? Not quite sure what to make of that guy.”

The 20’s dancers typically wear a mixture of bikinis and fantasy lingerie outfits. Guess Mayer — or his doppelgänger — was there to discover many wonderlands — more to tell Playboy.

Several sources at the club who wanted to remain anonymous confirmed that the pop-blues star was there — and was a generous tipper.

BACK IN THE DARK AGES, when my home away from home was a newspaper newsroom, one particular city editor was fond of saying someone had been "thinking with his little head and not his big one." True, that happens all the time.

John Mayer, on the other hand, may be the first person ever to have his little head -- in a fit of pique born of sexual frustration and boredom with the Sackcloth & Ashes '10 World Tour -- declare absolute autonomy from the "clean me" and head off to a titty bar . . . alone.

Wednesday night in Omaha wasn't the first time.

IN FACT, no sooner than Mayer had proclaimed himself the "clean me" at New York's Madison Square Garden a week ago, David Duke's c*** ran screaming into a nightclub and started talking dirty to all the ladies. At least that's what the Daily News says:

Mayer [The newspaper was confused because David Duke's c*** bears an uncanny resemblance to its former host, Mayer -- R21] spent the weekend partying at NoLita hot spot La Esquina - which is near the 2,500-square-foot SoHo apartment he owns - and acting, well, less-than-gentlemanly.

"He was drinking and saying vulgar things to the girls at the bar," says a spy. "He was hitting on one pretty brunette in particular, but she found him slimy because he was being so over-the-top."

We hear women aren't the only challenge the crooner can't seem to navigate: Friends say that even before the Playboy fiasco, he was having a love-hate relationship with the media.

"After every interview he gave, John would agonize over it and mentally kick himself over everything he said," says an insider. "He would swear it would be the last time, but it never was, and it became a never-ending cycle."

POOR JOHN. He goes to the trouble of apologizing and apologizing -- not to mention proclaiming his new "clean me" and letting 11-year-olds up on stage to play guitar with him for a number -- and look what happens. Done in by adolescent rebellion on the part of David Duke's c***.

As Uncle Jed used to say about Jethro on The Beverly Hillbillies, Mayer is "gonna have to have a looooong talk with that boy."

P.S.: I don't know about these things, so could someone tell me whether The '20s features an all-white crew of exotic dancers?

There yesterday, gone today

The old North Platte (Neb.) High School building, 1930-2003.

NBC's Don't See TV

The award for The Best Thing Written About the Conan-Leno Affair goes to. . . .

Envelope, please. (Where's that damn letter opener when you need it?)

One moment, please.

AHEM. The award for The Best Thing Written About the Conan-Leno Affair goes to . . . Christopher Lawrence of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Roll the videotape:

If you've ever been screwed over at work, don't watch "The Tonight Show." Conan O'Brien passed up lucrative offers, waited five years and moved, along with his staff, across the country to take over "The Tonight Show," but NBC never really gave it to him. By putting Leno on in prime time, with more fanfare and better guests -- not to mention giving viewers who just wanted to watch any talk show the chance to do that and get a decent night's sleep -- NBC set Conan up to fail from the start.

If you have any business sense whatsoever, don't watch "The Tonight Show." During his last two weeks on the air, Conan stopped being intimidated by "The Tonight Show" and started making captivating television. While Leno's ratings ticked up slightly, Conan's surged. Then there was the "Evita"-style scene with hundreds of Conan fans rallying for hours in the driving rain outside his studio. By contrast, Leno played The Mirage two days earlier, only doing one show instead of his customary two, and the venue had to offer half-price tickets. And NBC still dumped its newly minted folk hero in favor of the weasel with whom only 4 percent of Oprah's audience, some of the most forgiving viewers in the world, sided.

If you've ever been bullied, don't watch "The Tonight Show." Between slamming Conan in the press when he's contractually forbidden to respond and the tacky "Get back to where you once belonged" commercials for Leno, NBC's behavior has bordered on the shameless.

If you've ever actually been fired, don't watch "The Tonight Show." For someone who considers himself a man of the people, Leno's whining about how NBC "fired" him twice has been surprisingly tone deaf. Especially considering he doesn't even need the job, as he boasts of living solely off his stand-up money. Millions of Americans, including Conan, have genuinely lost their jobs over the past two years; Leno had his start time moved forward, then back, by 95 minutes.

The economy has gone to s***

Found this flier in the mailbox today.

Imagine, for a mere $7 a week, EntreMANURE K-9 Waste Removal will pick up the "leavings" of Molly the Dog and Scout.

They even have a slogan: "Your dog poops, our shovel scoops!"

Seems to me a reasonable price, and one I'm sure many yard-conscious Omahans would be willing to pay. I, however, am not one of those yard-conscious Omahans.

THE FIRM also will mow, weed and fertilize your yard. But here's the deal, at least from my perspective as the neighborhood lawn reprobate: Leave the poop, and you don't have to fertilize.

Because, you see, I have a slogan, too. But I can't say it here.

Oh, what the hell. Parents, take your kids away from the computer screen.

Here's my slogan, which has worked surprisingly well for me the past 21 years. Ready? Kids safely dispatched?

OK.

"My dog s***s, and there it sits."

Go ahead, call the neighborhood association. I wouldn't blame you.

Tell them to watch their step, though, when they come to take me away.

Us.

Here's the problem with trying to do what I'm kind of trying to do here -- basically, trying to shine a light through a glass darkly.

The problem is the medium is the message. The medium affects our behavior. And some media just demand that we sit there and worship . . . them. (Surely you're not watching NBC prime time because you really, really, really like staring at morbidly obese people in sports bras and muscle shirts.)

And the problem of trying to point out the absurdities of life through an utterly absurd medium -- utterly absurd media -- is kind of like a Catholic priest going to the savages, dressing up in his clerical finest . . . then presiding over a human sacrifice, all the while explaining to the primitives how in this sacrifice of the virgin Ubonga lies a shadow of Jesus' Paschal sacrifice which takes away the sins of the world.

Just so you know.

Almost as good as nekkid blackmail pics

You'd almost think the Omaha cop union has nekkid pictures of somebody at city hall.

How else to explain the sweetheart deals the city's police officers get whenever contract time rolls around. Great deals when Omaha's municipal coffers are flush, outstanding deals whenever they're not.

Take the last time the city was flirting with red ink. That time, in exchange for a temporary pay concessions, Omaha cops came away with a contract allowing them to base pension benefits on their highest-paid year.

The result? The specter of "public servants" working every possible hour of overtime right before they retire at age 47 and start pulling down $100,000 a year -- or something in a nearby neighborhood.

This year -- with the city flat broke and the pension fund headed for insolvency -- Mayor Jim Suttle's administration has negotiated an austerity contract with the cops. This, of course, means Omaha taxpayers should buy soap on a rope from now on.

BECAUSE, OF COURSE, officers contributing equally to the pension fund (or retiring on "retirement" levels of compensation) would be a bridge too far for the police union, the Omaha World-Herald reported last week:

Officer Aaron Hanson, union president, said a new contract would be a tough sell with his members, “given the extremely difficult discussion and vote that we already went through.”

If the city and the union reach an impasse on new contract terms, the decision would fall to the Nebraska Commission of Industrial Relations.

Festersen, Stothert and Thompson say they hope to work with Suttle and the union on a new version of the police contract. They say the pension provisions are still too generous.

“I don't think it's enough to say no,” Festersen said. “I hope to work with the mayor and my colleagues on some of these issues, to resolve them expediently.”

Stothert and Thompson said officers need to do more than give up spiking to help the troubled pension system.

The proposed contract requires police to take benefit cuts, including the end of “spiking” overtime and other pay to boost pensions before retirement. Spiking has allowed some officers to retire with pensions that are much higher than their regular pay on the job.

Spiking was never intended to be a benefit, Stothert and Thompson said. Police should instead absorb the cost of spiking and give up more to boost their share of contributions into the pension fund.

Hanson said the idea of using an officer's highest-paid year to determine pension benefits was indeed a benefit.

“That's been a benefit in the pension plan for years,” he said. “Now we are eliminating that concept.”

Under the proposed contract, a career average of pay would be used to determine pensions, a change that some council members say could still allow officers to retire with pensions equal to or more than their salaries.

Thompson said Suttle should have demanded that officers contribute more into the fund.

Instead, he said, the city would be saddled with a nearly 34 percent contribution rate that would be financed in the form of a new garbage collection fee, property tax hike or city sales tax increase. Police would contribute nearly 15 percent.

OMAHANS are not amused. In fact, a KETV Channel 7 news crew came up empty looking for backers of the pact among the general public:

The opponents' message was that they're taxed high enough and paying their fair share. They want the council to send the contract back to the bargaining table.

"It is absolutely obscene that somebody could retire in their mid-40s with a pension that exceeds his base salary and then expect the taxpayers to pay for that," said University of Nebraska-Omaha criminal justice professor Dr. Sam Walker.

Hanson said the new contract increases retirement age to 50, adding that officers face a penalty for retiring before 55 years of age.

"It's not surprising that some people are emotional about this issue," Hanson said. "But at the end of the day, it's not going to be emotion that's going to solve this problem. It's going to be finding the solution that complies with the law and achieves the savings necessary to balance."

Radio host Tom Becka, broadcasting live from City Hall, said police have gotten away with fat pensions in the past but now people are paying attention.

"You're seeing a lot of people with attitudes today, respecting police, respecting the firemen, but not respecting the contracts or the deals that have been made behind closed doors," Becka said.

SAM WALKER, the UNO professor, had better mind his 'P's and "Q's. In Omaha, it can be a dangerous thing to point out the obvious -- like, for example, very few among those paying cops' salaries have such a sweetheart deal as Omaha's finest.

The police union, you see, doesn't take to criticism, and it likes to play dirty.

Look what it did to a couple of now-former city councilmen who got on Aaron Hanson's bad side. Jim Vokal ran for mayor, only to have to cop union blanket the city with mailers portraying him as pedophiles' BFF at city hall.

It's not nekkid pictures, but it's almost as good. The fliers may not have been the reason Vokal didn't make the runoff, but they sure didn't help his cause.

Message delivered.

The bottom line in Omaha politics -- especially at the mayoral level -- is that nobody wants to piss off the police union. The union plays rough.

The union is highly political.

The union holds a grudge.

And the union will accuse an Omaha pol of being "soft on crime" faster than Glenn Beck will start blubbering in front of a TV camera.

VOTERS AIN'T EINSTEIN. For years, that has meant the Omaha electorate has been complicit in its own shakedown.

Hard times, though, can be a clarifying thing. As the fog of police-union mau-mauing begins to burn off under the burden of its own hot air, maybe the voters -- and the pols who answer to them -- are finally beginning to see the light.

Mutually assured deconstruction

Context.

Without context, it's easy to think just once about things that have another think coming.

Apparently, the lack of context has a whole lot of Ugly Americans -- your Mighty Favog included to some extent -- either ridiculing mercilessly (many YouTube commenters) or chuckling bemusedly (me) at one Edward Anatolevich Hill, Soviet-era singing sensation . . . and star of the video in the previous post.

Upon further review (and a trip down Google Lane), the man doesn't deserve it. And come to think of it, maybe the godless commissars were doing a lot better job with Soviet culture than the "free" market is doing with ours right about now.

OK, Comrade Hill was a little awkward-looking in that 1976 video from Soviet TV. So was Bruce Springsteen at last year's Super Bowl and The Who at this year's.

But there's a bunch to like in this 1966 performance on state television (above). Besides, I just saw Ludacris' "performance" Monday night on Letterman, and I'd give a farting chorus of Soviet collective-farm managers five stars by comparison.

Look at it this way. Ronald Reagan won the Cold War to make the world safe for hip-hop imperialists spewing cultural toxins into the global ecosystem? All while stereotypical "hos" shimmy in the background?

Where is Nikita Khrushchev when the world finally does need him to "bury" us -- preferably in Soviet-era music videos?

HERE'S SOME of that context I was mentioning about Comrade Hill's "vokaliz" performance, via Justin E.H. Smith's blog:

The song he is interpreting, "I Am So Happy to Finally Be Back Home," is an Ostrovskii composition, and it is meant to be sung in the vokaliz style, that is to say sung, but without words. I have seen a number of comments online, ever since a flurry of interest in Hill began just a few days ago, to the effect that this routine must have been meant as a critique of Soviet censorship, but in fact vokaliz was a well established genre, one that seems close in certain respects to pantomime.

Recent interest in Hill has to do with the perceived strangeness, the uncanniness, the surreal character of this performance. There is indeed something uncanny about a lip-synch to a song with no words, and his waxed face and hair helmet certainly do not carry over well. But once one does a bit of research, one learns that the number was not conceived out of some desire to cater to the so-bad-it's-good tastes of the Western YouTube generation, but in fact was meant to please --to genuinely please-- Soviet audiences who were capable of placing this routine, this man, and this song into a familiar context. The audiences would recognize, for example, that the same number had been performed by the Azerbaidzhani singer Muslim Magomaev in a film from the early 1960s, The Blue Spark:

One thing to notice is that, in spite of the absence of text, and of the fact that he is clearly lip-synching, there is nothing at all uncanny about Magomaev's version. It is a perfectly standard musical number from that era. So whatever it is that makes Hill so remarkable has to lie elsewhere than in what he has inherited from Ostrovskii and Magomaev, and what Soviet audiences would recognize as linking him to them. These other elements are the hair, the eyebrows, the elbows (I first decided to learn Russian when I became frustrated with the number of times the translator of my edition of War and Peace resorted to the phrase 'arms akimbo': surely, I thought, Russia can't really be a place where people so regularly resort to so special a posture). Still other elements are the set, the lighting, the quality of the color film: musical productions from the early 1960s still look charming and comforting; the same songs interpreted 15 years later often seem like perversions of the original. Hill's version seems nothing if not perverse, but what a bit of contextualization helps us to see is that this is not at all the result of his own innate weirdness, or of the innate absurdity of the song he has undertaken to sing.

THE POINT I think Smith is making here is that it was the '70s everywhere, even behind the Iron Curtain. The Brady Bunch Hour could happen anywhere . . . and did.

OR, AS ONE commenter put it, "It's easy to laugh at this bull****. But the Russians can just post clips of Lawrence Welk and we are owned. "

You mean, like this "modern spiritual by Gale and Dale"?

We're screwed.

Rod Dreher wonders sarcastically how the Soviet Union collapsed with cultural ammunition such as this.

I wonder seriously how, with cultural ammunition such as 50-Cent, we cannot.

Then there's this cultural linchpin of American greatness:


ALL THINGS being equal, I've developed a soft spot in my cultural heart for Soviets with bad suits and worse haircuts singing songs that, for sure, won't land you in a Siberian labor camp. And after this long, long winter on the snowy, frozen Plains, all I have to say is "YOOOOOOOOI, YOOOI YO-YOOOOOI! YOI YOI YOIIII, YOIIII YOI YOI!"

Oh, that and one more thing: Hold me closer, Tiny Dancer!

Why am I not surprised?

Choice is a dead-end proposition in America.

Whenever we talk about being "pro-choice," we're never referring to a mother thumbing her nose at the doomsayers predicting all manner of horrible outcomes -- both for her life and the baby's -- if she doesn't make a bold choice for death.

Whenever we talk about being "pro-choice," we don't mean women having the right to choose life -- an abundant life -- for their unborn children. As we conceive it, "choice" never leads anywhere but straight to Nihilism Street.

We "choose" in favor of ourselves, our fears, our desperation, our convenience.

WE "CHOOSE" against a being we've already chosen to regard as less than human, despite the biology of the matter. That is, unless the fetus is "wanted."

We're never envisioning a society that mobilizes its time, talent and treasure -- and I'm talking public as well as private treasure -- behind the idea of "no child left behind" . . . and no parent, either.

As it turns out, living life like Alice through the looking glass takes a toll on a society. It takes a toll on how we see things. Sooner or later, the funhouse-mirror view of things becomes normative, and reality seems monstrous.

AND SOONER OR LATER, we begin to regard our dying children (the ones we "chose" to let out of the womb alive) much as we do our dying pets. We're eager to "put the poor thing out of its misery."

Its misery.

There's been a study made, and The Associated Press wrote about it:

It's a situation too agonizing to contemplate — a child dying and in pain. Now a small but provocative study suggests that doctors may be giving fatal morphine doses to a few children dying of cancer, to end their suffering at their parents' request.

A handful of parents told researchers that they had asked doctors to hasten their children's deaths — and that doctors complied, using high doses of the powerful painkiller.

The lead author of the study and several other physicians said they doubt doctors are engaged in active mercy killing. Instead, they speculate the parents interviewed for the study mistakenly believed that doctors had followed their wishes.

A more likely scenario is that doctors increased morphine doses to ease pain, and that the children's subsequent deaths were only coincidental, said lead author Dr. Joanne Wolfe, a palliative pain specialist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children's Hospital in Boston.

The American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics and most other mainstream doctor groups oppose mercy-killing but say withholding life-prolonging treatment for dying patients can be ethical.

Dr. Douglas Diekema, a medical ethicist at Seattle Children's Hospital, said the study results are not surprising.

"I have no doubt that in a small number of cases, some physicians might cooperate with a parent's desire to see a child's suffering ended. This might include giving a drug for sedation or pain control that also suppresses the drive to breathe.

"Most physicians don't intentionally push that drug to the point of stopping a child's breathing, but some may be comfortable not intervening if a child stops breathing in the course of treating him or her for discomfort," Diekema said.

The study was published Monday in the March edition of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. It was based on interviews with parents of 141 children who had died of cancer and were treated at three hospitals, in Boston and Minnesota.

Among parents studied, one in eight, or 13 percent, said they had considered asking about ending their child's life, and 9 percent said they had that discussion with caregivers. Parents of five children said they had explicitly requested euthanasia for their dying children, and parents of three said it had been carried out, with morphine.

"If there was absolutely no other option, and the patient is suffering, then why wouldn't you" hasten death? said David Reilly, a Boston-area man whose 5-year-old son died of cancer 11 years ago.

THERE ARE REASONS -- more than 5,000 years' worth, in fact -- why children of Abraham ought look at one another differently than we do Spot, no matter how beloved Spot might be.

I suggest we begin to reacquaint ourselves on what those reasons are.

3 Chords & the Truth: This reminds me . . .

WBRH radio was where I got my start doing this kind of thing . . . with "this kind of thing" being 3 Chords & the Truth, the musical half of the Revolution 21 media empire.

The FM voice of Baton Rouge High School has been around for nearly 33 years now. Without the training your Mighty Favog got there during the station's earliest days, the Big Show would be hugely nonexistent all these years later.

THAT'S WHY it's so appropriate that one of the sets in today's episode is soooooooooooo quintessentially WBRH: The Rock 'n' Roll Days. It just is.

If you're up for a bit of sport, see whether you can figure out which set. This should be easy if you're from Baton Rouge and go back a ways.

And if you're interested, you can read more about WBRH here. And here. And here. And here.

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

A modern Stone Age media?

This is college newspapering. OK . . . was college newspapering, circa the fall of 1981.

It was analog and hard copy. As were we all back then at The Daily Reveille, premier news source for Louisiana State University.

What we have here are some photos I shot when I was a reporter there. They called me "Scoop" back then. No . . . really.

Well, Howard here (at right) looks like he's about to call me something else entirely. It's probably because I liked to do to deadlines back then what the Army liked to do to Iraqis at Abu Ghraib.

But that's not important now.

WHAT'S IMPORTANT is that these scenes from almost 29 years ago are glimpses into an era long gone, both on the campuses of larger universities and in the newsrooms of America's barely surviving newspapers.

There's a Facebook group devoted to the "Slow Media Movement." This right here -- this glimpse of something three decades past -- was about as slow-media as you can get. The news got to us at the speed of 66 words per minute on the wire and, locally, however fast a reporter could get back to the office to write something up for the morning paper.

No Internet. A few really, really primitive VDTs -- video display terminals. Today, we'd call them . . . actually, we wouldn't call them at all. They're obsolete.

They were glorified word processors with dumb terminals hooked up to a backshop rack filled with primitive computer hardware, which in turn connected to a typesetter.

But let's zoom in on part of that picture above. Let's zip past Howard and take a look at what the lovely, talented and very, very Greek (in the Izod and pledge-pin sense of the word) Carol is checking out.

THAT, my peeps, is a teletype machine. It brought us the world, via The Associated Press, at the aforementioned 66 words per minute.

No Web, no Twitter, no mobile news alert on your smart phone. Back then, you just had smart reporters who kept plenty of change on hand for plugging the nearest pay phone.

And the smartest reporters knew where the nearest pay phone was at all times and -- if the competition was around -- already had pocketed the mouthpiece.

Think of it. All the news fit to print trickling at a not-so-blistering 66 wpm into a news organization so primitive as to be effectively deaf, dumb and blind by today's standards.

THIS IS HOW that looked back then:

HERE'S SOMETHING for us to consider. By all standards of technological progress, all forms of media are immeasurably more capable and "plugged in" than they were in 1981. In many cases, college newspapers today have technological capabilities big-city newspapers couldn't have dreamed of more than two years before Michael Jackson did his first "moonwalk."

And college radio stations -- not to mention local commercial stations -- now sport facilities that would have been the envy of the networks three decades ago.

But that's not important now, either.

WHAT'S IMPORTANT is whether you're orders of magnitude better informed today than people were in 1981. This doesn't mean having a head stuffed with useless trivia, celebrity gossip and "Mafia Wars" and "Farmville" strategies.

It means this: Do you better understand the forces shaping your civic life -- better grasp the newsworthy events swirling around us, and hear of them appreciably sooner -- than you would have in 1981?

Has the quantity and quality of the information you receive -- the stuff you really, really need to know -- increased at anything approximating the rate at which information technology has advanced since the days of Walter Cronkite's "That's the way it is" and a brand-new IBM gizmo called the "PC"?

If not, why not?

THE CAPABILITY is there. Virtual mountains of information are a mouse click away.

Are you taking full advantage, however? Can you fully? And can you still get the news you need to know about where you live?

How is this possible when profit-challenged newspapers -- and radio and TV stations -- are shedding newsgatherers and editors at an alarming rate? What has replaced the "old media"? Has anything replaced the "old media" where you are?

If so, is it as good as what you've lost?

Is this an information revolution, or is it just sound and fury signifying . . . nothing?

Me, I'm still waiting to hear those five bells -- BULLETIN! -- on the AP teletype. I'll let you know what the big news is.

The river and me, 1982

When you're a poor college student, the Mississippi River and a ferryboat can be an excellent -- and free -- way to kill some time on a summer weekend.

What you see here is the result of some productive time-killing one afternoon in, I am pretty sure, 1982. All I needed was to load myself and my secondhand Canon TX into my secondhand 1976 Chevy Vega (don't get me started) and drive down to the ferry landing on Plaquemine Point, south of Baton Rouge.

I'm relatively sure I was aiming to get some feature photos for The Summer Reveille at LSU. I was editorial assistant that summer semester of '82, my photojournalism class a couple of semesters before was still fresh in my mind . . . and it was a great way to kill time.

Cheap.

I honestly can't remember whether any of these photos got into the paper. I absolutely do know I hadn't taken a good look at those negatives for 28 years, not until I scanned them just now.

AND THE PERSON who left a comment yesterday on this post asking for more old Baton Rouge photos on the blog? Here you go.

More will follow.

For the record, I love this shot (left) of crewmen on the ferry's bridge scoping out a fine specimen of a female passenger. (What the hell do you think I was doing at the time?)

I, however, had a 35-millimeter camera and the excuse of taking feature photos for the LSU student newspaper.

That camera. I bought it the year before from City Pawn Shop downtown on Riverside Mall, which we all still called Third Street -- and which it officially is once again -- and I carried it just about everywhere.

What funded the purchase were the proceeds from the first freelance story I ever sold -- to the local paper. It was a history piece about the life and death decades earlier of Baton Rouge's first educational radio station, WLSU.

The story ran over two editions of the State-Times' and Morning Advocate's Friday entertainment magazine, Fun. I got $100, and then I got that camera.

I still have it today, and I still use it when I get a wild hair to shoot with actual film.

ANYWAY, what you see here -- untouched for almost three decades -- is a day in the life of the Plaquemine ferry, which ran and still runs between St. Gabriel on the east side of Iberville Parish and Plaquemine on the west. Look. It even has a Twitter feed.

Back in the day, I remember that election results from the eastern half of Iberville always came in last because you had to wait on the ferryboat.

TO TELL you the truth, more people should have to wait on the ferryboat -- even if you don't have a river to get across. You can't get in a hurry on a ferry; it comes when it comes, and you get to the other side when you get to the other side.

Ferryboats get you out of your aluminum-and-steel cocoon. They make it hard not to meet your neighbor . . . at least if you're both going the same way. And they put you in touch with the grandeur of nature.

In the case of the Plaquemine ferry, that would be the mighty, mile-wide Mississippi River.

The Plaquemine ferry: It was a damn fine way to kill a Saturday afternoon.

Bet it still is, too.

Are you $#!++!@& me?

Andrew Breitbart and the gang at Breitbart.tv are upset that Senate Democrats now threaten to do what the Dems were upset about the Republicans trying to do in 2005.

Like, shouldn't he be saying "Hey! They finally came around to our way of thinking"?

No, he'd only be happy if the Democrats were upset that the Republicans had regained power and were threatening to do what they were upset about the Dems threatening to do what they were upset about the GOP threatening to do in 2005.

I think. My brain hurts now.

Nevertheless, I think it's eminently safe to say that hypocrisy is what makes our nation's capital go 'round. And that everybody comes out looking like what Tony Kornheiser might have thought Hannah Storm resembled the other day.

And, for the record, I think Hannah can wear whatever in the world she wants. Just sayin'.

Osama bin King, R-Iowa

Remember how mad you were when you saw Palestinians celebrating on 9/11?

Steve King, southwest Iowa's mad-hatter member of Congress, is one of those people. Just so long as the target for the terrorist's flying bomb is the Internal Revenue Service.

ACCORDING to Talking Points Memo, the Iowegian carbuncle on the House's ass told a panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference he could "empathize" with a domestic terrorist like Tea Party Airlines pilot Joe Stack:

King's comments weren't recorded, but a staffer for Media Matters, who heard the comments, provided TPMmuckraker with an account.

The staffer, who requested anonymity because she's not a communications specialist, said that King, an extreme right-winger with a reputation for eyebrow-raising rhetoric, appeared as a surprise guest speaker on an immigration panel at the conservative conference. During his closing remarks, King veered into a complaint about high taxes, and said he could "empathize" with the man who flew a plane into an IRS building last week.

During the question and answer session, the Media Matters staffer asked King to clarify his comment, reminding him of his sworn duty to protect the American people from all sworn enemies, foreign and domestic. In response, said the staffer, King gave a long and convoluted answer about having been personally audited by the IRS, and ended by saying he intended to hold a fundraiser to help people "implode" their local IRS office.

HELL, we invaded Iraq on flimsier evidence than that regarding Saddam Hussein's supposed support for al-Qaida. What to make of a sitting congressman who can "empathize" with domestic terrorists who launch suicide attacks against the United States government?

When confronted by Think Progress about his remarks, King said that if we just hadn't built the World Trade Center and Pentagon, those 9/11 suicide jockeys wouldn't have had anywhere to aim those jetliners full of innocent Americans. Or something like that:

I think if we’d abolished the IRS back when I first advocated it, he wouldn’t have a target for his airplane. And I’m still for abolishing the IRS, I’ve been for it for thirty years and I’m for a national sales tax.

(snip)

It’s sad the incident in Texas happened, but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary and when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the IRS, it’s going to be a happy day for America.

WITH THE political heat now on high, King took the weasel route in an interview published in this morning's Omaha World-Herald:

King said his heart goes out to the victims in Austin and their families.

“These acts of violence have no place in our society to be condoned or supported,” King told The World-Herald. “When someone finds themselves in this position of extreme frustration with the IRS, which I do understand that frustration, they should do what I did, get involved in the process.”

King said his treatment by the IRS contributed to his decision to run for public office.

As for the comments about imploding IRS buildings, King said he was employing levity in discussing his belief that the IRS should be abolished. He said he was referring to imploding the empty buildings left behind.

YEAH, RIGHT.

You know, if only the voters of southwest Iowa hadn't elected such a radical asshat to Congress, we who live across the Missouri River in Nebraska wouldn't point our fingers eastward and laugh so hard.

Maybe we should stop that, though. Terrorist-loving creeps like King -- especially when they get elected to high office -- hardly are a laughing matter.

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The world is going to hell in a handbasket, people are scared, government doesn't govern anymore and Tea Party Airlines is flying non-stop -- and one-way -- into your local IRS office.


We live in perilous times. The national mood is dark. There is a crisis of confidence. Tensions are rising. A cloud hangs over the land. Uncertainty has cast a shadow over fill-in-the-blank, and clichés are running rampant.

If you are a major national news operation, there is only one thing to do. Fire a s***load of people so the stockholders can enjoy a modest short-term windfall from the middling benefits to the bottom line of your corporate overlord.

THIS TIME, it's ABC News' turn to throw journalists out of work and add to national ignorance.

The New York Times blog Media Decoder has the details about a newsroom bloodletting that, for a change, isn't one of its own:

In what it called a “fundamental transformation,” ABC News said Tuesday that it was seeking to substantially reduce its staff, possibly by up to 25 percent.

Employees said they were told that the news division is seeking 300 to 400 buyouts, and would resort to layoffs if necessary. ABC News currently employs roughly 1,400 people.

The cuts at ABC, a unit of The Walt Disney Company, are among the steepest ever conducted by a network news division, and are likely to be seen as a further erosion of the company’s news-gathering arm.

ABC News employees said Tuesday that the reaction to the cutbacks was muted, mostly because the announcement had been expected for weeks. “Everyone sees the reality of the industry, and everyone wants to stay competitive,” said one employee who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized by the network to speak to other media outlets.

In a memorandum to staffers, the ABC News president David Westin said the “transformation” would result in a leaner, smaller news division. “The time has come to re-think how we do what we are doing,” Mr. Westin wrote.

IN THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, meantime, there's this:

For the last month, the newsroom has been rife with rumors about the cutbacks, which are poised to be the most dramatic reshaping of ABC News since Roone Arledge revolutionized the division by recruiting a team of high-wattage anchors and launching new franchises during his 20-year tenure as news president. Anxious staffers are not only fearful about losing their jobs, but are apprehensive about how the restructuring will impact their ability to chase big stories and swarm major news events if they remain.

ABC executives are internally casting the belt-tightening not as a retrenchment but as a repositioning. By streamlining news-gathering operations now, officials hope to stave off repeated cuts in the coming years. They argue that a smaller news division does not mean a less competitive one. With technological advancements such as hand-held digital cameras, the news division can now dispatch one person to cover a story that once required a correspondent, producer and two-person crew.

News organizations large and small have been forced to let go of staff and reduce expenses in the last few years to cope with a drop in advertising revenue caused by the global economic slowdown. Earlier this month, CBS News cut at least 90 positions, shuttering its Moscow bureau and significantly shrinking its staff in Washington, London and Los Angeles.

NOTE WELL, regarding the touting of "technological advancements such as hand-held digital cameras," that media outlets do not often pursue a grand plan of using technology to dramatically expand or improve basic news coverage. At least not out of the unfettered public-spiritedness of their selfless hearts.

Instead, it's more like this: They use technology a) to get a competitive edge on the competition, b) to cut costs or c) to look cool in front of all the other kids at the trade conventions.

If newspaper journalists paid their publishers to come to work every day and Linotypes were cheaper than computers, reporters would still be yelling "Toots, get me rewrite!" into candlestick telephones while hot lead flew in backshops unchanged since H.L. Mencken was Jon Stewart.

And ink-stained wretches reeking of Seagram's VO and surrounded by paste pots, pica poles and soft-lead pencils still would be closing out the final edition of The Daily Blab at 2 a.m. -- not the 12 midnight made possible by our glorious technology.

REWRITE! Hold the line!

Isn't technology supposed to let us do the same with less, like the miracle it's going to work at ABC News?

Yeah, right. Ask The Daily Blab, where positions started disappearing long ago because technology allowed publishers to get three jobs' worth of work out of each digitally assisted employee. Instead of giving the public a greatly enhanced, more timely newspaper, what computerization allowed publishers to do instead was give readers the same old thing produced by lots fewer people.

It also allowed publishers to give themselves a 20- or 30-percent profit margin.

Which, I suspect, is where the 2 a.m. deadline went in an age when, theoretically, papers should have been able to push them back instead of moving them way up. It's about the cash, Nash.

It's about deciding cost efficiency dictated that you close out the morning paper at midnight with a staff of 100 instead of making deadline at 2 with a staff of 120.

TO BE SURE, paradigms and business models are shifting underneath nervous traditional-media types as I write this. To be surer, greed and corporate overreach has given scribblers and newsreaders less room to maneuver as the future bears down on them.

And to be surer still, the biggest problem is that corporations like Disney, or CBS Corporation (or pick a newspaper or radio group) have been focused on short-term profits rather than long-term survival -- and, now, squeezing the last drops of profitability out of suddenly iffy (Surprise!!!) concerns.

So save the bushwa about the wonderful journalistic efficiency of digital camcorders and one-man-band TV reporters. I might believe it if bunches of reporters, editors, cameramen and soundmen weren't getting the ol- heave-ho to make room for the Glorious Age of Technology.

Instead of, like, you know, putting two or three times as many "digital journalists" out on the streets to keep the bastards honest.