Casey Jones, You Better Watch Your Speed

I fought the law today, and the law won. Naturally. 

But I did get a chance to question an “automatic traffic enforcement unit” supervisor and engage in some byplay with nice-enough June Cleaverish judge whose legal career has awarded her realm over the county court dedicated to speed camera violations. 

Some people are outraged by abortion, some by the easy availability of guns, some by war. The single issue upon which I will vote for or against local candidates is the misuse of speed cameras (I am kind of.a okay with red light cameras, because running red lights does cause accidents.)  

As everyone knows, these cameras are set to enhance revenue for jurisdictions whose leaders are too chicken-shit to actually raise taxes. As I have told the several public officials I know, “Tax me, but don’t disguise the act as traffic enforcement.” 

The camera in question has nailed me in the past, so I naturally am somewhat careful on a heavily traveled road I have used approximately 3,000-4,000 times. I and the spousal unit have probably gotten a total of five speeding citations, which we have routinely paid because the county (and state) will not assign points or contact your insurance company, even though you are menace to life and limb. 

My questions and testimony dwelt on the fact that no matter how fast you may be going, the camera always records your violation at 12 miles above the artificially low posted speed. I asked the officer, “If I were going 100 mph, would the citation read 100 mph.” He replied with the “factual inexactitude, “Yes.” 

A similar road elsewhere in the county has 50 mph limit, and I learned from the judge and officer that these limits are set by community groups. Boy, would I like to get on one of those! I am against speeding. I am against reckless driving. I sometimes wish I had a James Bond car, or a Batmobile, that could evaporate offenders. But these cameras are placed on roads (especially hills) and in neighborhoods designed to scoop up money that would go uncollected if the violations were actually seen but not noted by an actual police officer. Of course the cameras are operated by a private company. 

There might have been 100 names on the list of cases, but only about 20 showed up for this morning’s court (the rest having paid already or decided to skip and wait till their registration renewal is denied.) 

I went, knowing what would happen, but I have time these days and I wanted at least the judge to hear the enmity that local government engenders it is driving public. A few other people, one a scientist, said her three tickets recorded at exactly the same speed “strained credulity.” (I think she had to pay only one of them.)  

The result was, for showing up with an oral excuse, that the $40 fine was cut to $20 plus court costs of $22.50. You do the math. Plus the $4 it cost to park. 

As a bonus to having the judge and other traffic miscreants hear my case (one of them congratulated me on my performance later on in the hall and I recalled Abbie Hoffman’s dictum that “In the halls of justice the only justice is in the halls) there was someone taking notes on every case on a reporter’s notepad. 

She is an “investigative producer” for a local station, which already did a piece on this abomination of justice – with the reporter doing the “standup” guess where – at “my” speed camera. I expect to contact her.

 

I may even start a political movement to rid the county of speed cameras and replace them with a rotation of actual cops, whose presence for one week at a given location, will reap benefits for months. What if such a movement of everyone at a given location going exactly the speed limit tied up commerce so badly that politicians had to listen? What about establishing "rolling roadblocks" on multilane highways at exactly the posted limit?

In the meantime, there are several liberal Democratic local officials – buccaneers – who will never get my vote because they smirk “Don’t speed” as they happily spend public money garnered in such dastardly fashion.

Muting the Mawkish

The “mute” button will be my favorite and most used device of the day because TV today, especially the football portion of the schedule, will be dripping with inappropriate, if not fake, patriotic gestures staged by this generation’s Joseph Goebbelses -- reborn as Roger Ailes and Karl Rove.

I do plan to watch football and check the news at the appointed hours to see if there is anything I need to know.

What I don’t need to know is what a zillion talking heads think about 9/11 or what the anniversary means. What I did need to know, I got early in the day from a documentary run on all the History Channels, consisting of raw footage of that morning 10 years ago. No narration, just an assemblage of contemporaneously live home video, with a minimum of TV news blather.

The universal instantaneous reaction seemed to be that no one knew what was happening. They seemed to know why (Arab terrorism) but not what” -- which is the normal human reaction to the incomprehensible. Yet 10 years later the United States still does not know what to do. The morning paper carries the impossible-to-believe news that the Obama administration is about to sign a pact with Turkey for the basing of American drones – the purpose being for the Turks to crush the Kurdish minority, who a few short years ago we were defending from the predations of Saddam Hussein.

We still think Pakistan is our friend, and we still think we can make Afghanistan a democracy. On foreign policy and national security issues, a president of color with a Muslim name is no better than the playboy prince he succeeded.

The aforementioned morning newspaper sports section carried a full page (thus, expensive) ad from the devil himself, Redskins owner Dan Snyder, depicting a Redskin charging across the national Mall carrying an American flag like the upraised sword of a crusader. The page tells us that the Redskins “thank and salute our heroes” and that the Redskins “will always remember.” Did I mention that it also says “God Bless America?”

One more reason I hope the Redskins lose every game they every play under the ownership of this monstrous height-challenged ninny who, it was reported elsewhere in the section, was under the influence of alcohol when he decided to hire the current coach.

We each have our own remembrance of and meaning for 9/11/01, and no one’s is any more valid than another’s. One thing that is a lie, however, is that “nothing would ever be the same.”

It won’t be the same for families and friends of the dead, but for the rest of us, life (except for airport security) is pretty much the same as ever. Football on Sundays (Mondays and Thursdays as well as Friday nights and Saturday afternoons), a warlike national mentality guided by a foreign policy that dooms this country to slow demise and the unwillingness of enough young people to enlist and carry it out.

The only area of national life that has changed was that George W. Bush’s prosecution of two misconceived wars, George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich and George W. Bush’s stewardship of the mortgage bust made this generation and the next one poorer than the ones that preceded it.

Watching the raw footage of what happened 10 years ago today can certainly inspire hatred and wishes for revenge, and I am as hateful and vengeance-minded as the next

American. But those twin towers of viscera should be directed at Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and every other Islamic government that harbors terrorists. We know who they are, and so do they.

So spare me the crock of “heroes” and “unity” and “God.” No “hero” sacrificed his or her life to protect my freedom. If God had truly blessed America, it means He has damned everyone else. We have not been this disunited as a nation since the Civil War. Because of 9/11, I have less freedom today than I did 10 years because while we were weakened as a nation, it was more a result of our own government’s reaction to it than by the precipitating act itself.

"When in Doubt, Call them Out"

I am finally back after a week of umpiring at a baseball camp called Cooperstown Dreams Park, which brings in 104 teams of 12-year-olds a week during the summer, at somewhere between $700 and $1,200 a pop to bathe in the glory of the Hall of Fame about five miles away.

As an ump, there is much I leave to be desired, but I learned a lot about the art and craft and loved my time on perfectly manicured and lighted fields. The sleeping conditions were Third Worldly – 12 men to an un-air-conditioned barracks (24 kids to each of 100 or so of them) — and nothing to do in off hours but trade pins and listen to fat old tattooed men and a few young studs boast about their greatest umpiring moments.

Among the pearls of wisdom were, “When in doubt, call them out,” and “Let’s go out and crush some dreams today.” Along with, “Call strikes and let’s get off the field.” (I must say there were a couple of older gents who were very helpful to me on actual umping situations.)

What was worse than mingling with umpire egos as fat as their asses, was the owner of this million-dollar-a-week bonanza, who in two addresses to umpires, used the occasions to offer irrelevant and dark personal sermons about baseball, life, America, the flag, homosexuals, women and “a dark-complected kid with hair on his lip.”

The owner almost had me leaving in the first hours when he actually said, “This is not about the kids. It’s about that,”and he pointed to the flag, noting that he had several brothers who served in World War II back in the day when everyone honored war veterans, unlike now, he claimed.

Needless to say, I will not return later this summer, next year or ever. These kids are nice and damn good ballplayers, but they are under incredible pressure to perform, so much so that I saw at least two kids who already had had shoulder and knee surgery. The kids are being exploited by their parents and coaches, and the parents and coaches are being exploited by the ownership of this highly regimented, authority-driven dream -- of one person.

One other thought: Apparently all 12-year-old boys are named Hunter, Holden, Parker or Austin.

Transparent Vindication

As loyal readers may recall, I was suddenly defederalized last October a few weeks short of being legally immune from employer abuse of the kind administered to at least four older workers in the FDA public affairs shop.

Everyone knew the that new boss was not only not the same as the old boss but actually was parachuted in from a planet where “communication” meant silence, “transparency” meant hiding information and “public service” meant “no we can’t.”

Now, however, it seems that either her ability as a manager was exposed to her bosses or she failed to toady enough to the Obama hacks. (I can’t prove anything, but I suspect the former.) She is, I am reliably told, leaving government to join an advocacy/lobbying group run by the state politician whom she worked for before arriving in DC to wreak her damage here. In Washington, departing a high profile job in only one year is not a sign of success.

Anyway, this is not the story of one guy having a problem with one bad boss. I have moved on happily from other ones and survived. This is a story about how what happened in front of my naive eyes seems emblematic of what is going on elsewhere in government -- the wreckage of Obama's pretense of bringing a fresh way of doing things to Washington.

Many of my own observations are confirmed by an op-ed in today’s Washington Post detailing how this administration is more secret and contemptuous of public information than the Bush administration.

In the meantime, I remain one of the uncounted unemployed. Vindication doesn’t put food on the table, but it does taste sweet to announce, “Boss, thy name is ‘Payback.’”

SEO: The Epitaph for Journalism

Looking for suitable employment in my area of expertise, communicating important information to the public, I feel defeated – defeated by the evolution of journalism from almost a priestly calling to a puerile exercise in “search engine optimization.’"

Much criticism of the “mainstream media” centers on the notion of “media elites” deciding what is important and then propagating a presumed progressive agenda that “real Americans” are too stupid to figure out. Actually, I don’t have a problem with that at all. I’m not Ivy League, but I always thought I was smarter than the readers I was writing for and was doing them a favor by both reporting concisely and understandably about important government actions and presenting newsworthy material in a way that either explained the unexplainable or even offered a smile or two.
People who entered journalism over the past hundred years or so were actually spawn of the lower classes, had dirt under their fingernails, had an outlook on life representative of the commoner and had a passion for the underdog. Journalists knew what the people wanted because they were of the people. (A common aphorism that is still partially true today was that the definition of news is “what happened to the editor today.”)

Blame it on Watergate, which was broken by guys of no particularly great educational or social standing. After that, there was money and fame to be had. By the time I got to the White House in 1983, the rising stars in print and television came from money and New England schools and identified with the pain of high taxes, the importance of private schools for their kids and who got to play tennis or go to dinner with their presumed equals in governments.

A Brief History of Slime
Television news had already been sold down the river of greed when networks realized they could actually make a profit on it instead of using news as a loss leader. Print journalism had begun becoming professionalized. We student journalists, and later as paid journalists, began calling ourselves professionals. That was always a self-serving myth because there is no specialized training, board exam or licensing requirement. We were, in reality, people having the times of their lives snooping around and making life difficult for those in government, or out, who were unfairly taking advantage of people who did not have our access to information.

So many things have changed that I cannot now bear to watch more than the first five minutes of any newscast, local, network or cable. There is the matter of broadcast outlets hiring people who cannot write and cannot read. How often have you seen the “crawl” at the bottom of the screen, or the chyron describing what you are seeing and notice basic words and names being misspelled? How many times have you heard a ponderous anchor read something and jerk your head up and say, “huh?” How much longer must NBC employ the queen of nonsense, Janet Shamlian, who never fails to impress listeners with her vacuity – and sometimes her bent for the absurd, such as when she said, “A heat wave has a chokehold on the nation’s midsection?”


Why should I or anyone care about a two-bit bank robbery hundreds of miles away? Or a car chase on the other coast? Or a granny slamming a robber with her purse? A tire fire in West Virginia? The answer, my friends, is blowin’ in the vids. Matters of real importance are ignored unless they appeared in one of three newspapers that morning. And then the TV thieves pass off the information as their own, with no context whatsoever. Despite a multiplicity of broadcast and internet venues, all news comes from a handful of sources: the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. If local news is big enough to go national, you might add the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.

To my further dismay, what is written about or broadcast in most outlets is picked up from and credited to competing organizations. There is no attempt to independently verify much less even cover someone else’s story. The “news” you read on line on portals such as AOL, Yahoo, Huffpo -- and even some of the more prestigious online outlets – is frequently repurposed or merely linked to someone else’s report of a report. This use of someone else’s enterprise used to be a journalistic sin of the first order.

Competition from the Internet has rendered irrelevant even such a venerated organ as the Washington Post, which is so thin you can literally tear the non-ad portion of the Sunday paper in half. The daily version would blow away on your lawn if it weren’t tied up in plastic.

It is an old axiom in newsrooms that sex, violence, children and animals do automatically qualify as news. But, it also had to be local or of some national significance. Nowadays, every commercial television news program wallows in violence, fire and prurience that happens anywhere in the world – so long as video of it exists. Many stories are broadcast as “breaking news” for as long as two days after the event happened.

Online and on the air, there is zero quality control over news judgment. No one asks questions.

Scott Brown and Lara Logan
Sen. Scott Brown pitches a revelation (for his own pecuniary and political interests) that he was sexually molested by a camp counselor although it was never “consummated, so to speak” and although he will not protect other victims by actually prosecuting the offender.

I have never seen Lara Logan’s reporting to know whether it is good or bad, but I sure have heard of her, because this former swimsuit model has a penchant for becoming the story both within journalism and in the bedrooms of other journalists. Yet she becomes a national tragedy for, according to CBS, having been brutally sexually assaulted in Cairo.

Without minimizing the terror and injustice of it all, it appears from other accounts that she was stripped, hit with flagpoles and pinched. This is abominable, but if true, this – along with the headlines generated by former Cosmo nude model Scott Brown – falls short of the disgusting images that were intentionally meant to titillate us.

To whatever degrees Scott Brown and Lara Logan were defiled, why on earth is it any of our business? Because they are both in the business of selling themselves, the media are in the business of selling depravity and we consumers are in the business of lapping it up.

Wheat and Chaff
I, for one, want people smarter and possessing a broader knowledge of the world than I telling me not what I should think but what I should know. That used to be the foundation of any education. It used to be the true value of a newspaper or magazine – the placement of information you would never have thought to look for amid the funnies, sports and lingerie ads.

Not anymore. As I look over media jobs that are available, the requirements do include an ability to multitask at a reasonable level of proficiency with the language, but the prime attributes that news organizations are seeking are (as described in a recent ad for a reporting position with USA Today) experience with “SEO, audience metrics, promoting audience interaction.” On more than one job-listing site, journalism positions are to be found under the category “Industry: e-commerce.”

I am not naïve. Journalism has always been about money – publishers having all of it and reporters having too little of it to live on. But there was always the pretense of providing the public with an honest service and, for the most part, free from the publishers’ rapacious capitalist biases.

Today, with the advent of interactive Web sites and sophisticated metrics, editors and producers are capable of selecting as “news” only what people tell them they want. The old saw is truer than ever: editors separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.

Yes, I believe – as do all politicians – that the public is stupid and self-destructive beyond measurement and that better-educated and fair-minded people ought to tell us what is important -- which is exactly what happens when we hire hire lawyers, accountants and plumbers.

The following is a letter I have sent to the president of the Society of Professional Journalists regarding the "retirement" of the organization's Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award.

I have just learned, with dismay, of the SPJ Board’s decision to “retire” the Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award. No matter how much this baby was split, the decision is, nevertheless, a repudiation of the person for whom it is named and whose lifetime achievement is considerably greater than the sum of that attained by the entire board.

It was said the “controversy” over the award would diminish the honor for any future recipient. While Ms. Thomas’ recently expressed views that are controversial and repugnant to many, including myself, it is her journalism that was being honored, and there is no hint of anything but excellence, professionalism and courage in her 57 years with United Press International, where I was privileged to work alongside her.

Until I heard of this “controversy,” I was not aware there was any actual controversy, other than that raised by certain board members themselves in response to outside pressure.

I hope the irony is not lost that a majority of the board, as listed on the SPJ Web site, is composed of women, each and every one of whom owes a portion of her success to pioneers like Helen Thomas. I hope they went back and looked at some of the publicly expressed views of SPJ icons Eugene Pulliam and James J. Kilpatrick before making their decision.

I was honored to have been “tapped” for SPJ’s predecessor, Sigma Delta Chi, as a college student in 1967, back when it was truly an honorary organization. When my renewal notice arrives in the mail, I will have to reconsider the definition of honor.

Hope, Change and the Chicago Way

It is now five weeks after leaving what I thought would be a career capstone job at FDA. Last November, a fairly new public affairs chief at the agency whom I had known from both journalism and health advocacy hired me along with five other experienced hands to bulk up the media relations staff. The job was stressful but good, requiring me to absorb a lot of new knowledge and deal with several crises a day. I got on well the boss, and was told that whatever I needed to understand, I would pick up within the one-year probationary period and that no one fails that test unless they violate the law.

However, he was moved aside in favor of a 30-year-old political operative whose previous job was press secretary to the governor of Kansas, now the HHS secretary. The new boss had no big-league experience, no managerial experience and no warmth. Remote was not only her typical work venue but her style of management, communicating with us line troops rarely and then mostly by emails that second-guessed everything.

So as I recognized things were going to be difficult, I started asking around and received assurances from my closest colleagues and mentors that I was doing fine and not to worry. Then one day I was called to my boss’s office and given two pieces of paper. A notice of termination and a resignation. Choose, I was told, and choose right then. To add insult to the injury, she cited fabricated, unspecified instances of my incompetence after 40 years in the business. She did not need to do that because the government has the right to terminate anyone on probation for no reason.

I was not alone. Four of us over 50 years of age were ousted, called incompetent and apparently replaced with cheaper, younger acolytes. They and the excellent civil servants who remain – and they are the finest coworkers I have ever had – have now gotten the message. None of the four of us who were in disfavor made waves or did anything but approach the job professionally. But we were not hired by her, so we became expendable.

In the meantime, there are four highly competent people who sought to bring their talents to a beleaguered “good guy” agency and who – instead of being offered other suitable positions – were suddenly, and without precedent, asked to give up well paying, responsible jobs at the precise moment in their lives when they are unlikely to get another one.

326 Days

Members of my family have worked for the federal government for roughly 130 years. So, it was with enthusiasm that I jumped at the chance late last year to go to work in the public affairs office of the FDA.

I was excited about serving in government under an administration that promised transparency and change. I approached the job with enthusiasm, diligence and 40 years of experience in the world of media. Every single day, I enjoyed the difficult challenge and believe that I rose to it.

Unfortunately, the person who hired me was replaced early in my tenure, and this week I resigned after 326 days -- the third to depart of the six hired at the same time last November.

While the agency itself is pursuing laudable goals, the methods and goals of the new public affairs leader -- a political appointee who was 10 years from being born when I began working in media -- are radically different than the old.

Odd though it may seem, I may pursue opportunities elsewhere in the agency or in government; I may resume consulting; or I may retire to browner pastures.

No Butts

At 9:45 a.m. 15 years ago on this date, I tossed something out the car window – a cigarette butt. I suspected but didn’t know at the time it would be the last one.

After a third session of hypnosis, I was ready to quit 33 years after first picking up a Kent with a Micronite® filter – before the Surgeon General’s warning and back when they were about 30 cents a pack, maybe even less.

I had quit many times before, once for as long as six years, and I still maintain I was not addicted to the nicotine as to the pleasure of having something in my mouth all the time as a necessary diversion from the stress of being me. The act of fishing for the weed and lighting it up would interrupt an already inattentive mind and reset it to attack the next executive mental function.

Obviously, there is nothing good about smoking, and, as with all addicts, there is always a general desire to quit. For me, hypnosis worked permanently on the tobacco as it did temporarily six years later when I lost a lot of weight.

One effect I think is recognizable among substance abusers of all kinds was the occasional dream/nightmare where I am going about the normal course of business and find myself with a half-smoked cigarette in my mouth, without remembering have made the decision to light it up. Failure! Wasted effort! Defeat! But that dream has subsided, replaced by other ones, where I can’t breathe at all!

I still have post-nasal drip, an occasional dry cough, little lung capacity, a substitute addiction for caffeine in the form of soft drinks and chocolate, my highest weight ever, nail-biting and tooth grinding.

Yet look at the money I’ve saved – about $2,500 a year based on the current price of a pack.

Aside from unknowable long-term health benefits, the main value of quitting was the knowledge that I could. Just like when I learned to drive my wife’s stick shift when we were first married and then traded the car in after proving I could.

Myth of the Curmudgeon

I visited with my extended family up from Florida last night to help welcome two new members. They are Gino and Sammy, age 3 and 4 respectively, who until last spring were orphans in Haiti. The earthquake proved fortuitous in one respect; that my nephew Tim was able to go to the island and expedite their adoption.

They join their older sisters Zoe and Adoniyah their mom, Jen. Although they are not "matched" in the way we expect siblings to be, there is not a set of four more beautiful and likable children that I have ever run across. Not even in my car!

To visit them, I bypassed my usual Thursday night volunteer recording of textbooks for the blind and dyslexic.

But I got my reading in by offering up a couple of kid favorites and entertaining an audience that really couldn't help being held captive.

Sammy is the left, Gino to the right, Addie on my lap and Clyde, the son of a friend of Tim's and Jen's behind me.

.

And heeeeere's Zoe!

Some of Her Best Friends

The brilliance of “Kids Say the Darndest Things,” the early television featured created by Art Linkletter who died last week, was that children have brains enough to view the world in an organized fashion but have not yet developed the inhibitions to keep them from saying those darndest things.

The same is true of old people. The inhibitions are lost, either through brain chemistry, or just the feeling, “What have I got to lose by saying what’s on my mind?” Believe me, I am in that latter category while still too young for Social Security.

Unfortunately, my former colleague, mentor and good friend Helen Thomas never lost her fastball, but she lost her inhibitions. She did the only thing possible today after making horrendously ugly remarks. She retired instantly after 67 years reporting on Washington – the past 49 from the White House.

She had a serious health incident in recent years but, as her friends predicted, Helen bounced back as strong and acid as vinegar. I am afraid, now that she has to stop doing the only thing she has ever done, that there may not be much for her to look forward to. My advice is for her to spend her days writing, even if only for relatives and posterity. She already has said too much for public consumption.

It didn’t take long during my tenure at the White House reporting next to her to figure out that non-news-related conversations about the Middle East were not going to end well. So I never raised it. Helen had a legitimate reason, as an Arab-American and as a citizen with a mind, to fault Israel and praise the wicked.

But Helen’s recent remarks betrayed her keen sense of history. She made the biggest mistake that every closet anti-Semite eventually makes – failing to distinguish between Zionism and Judaism. She failed to notice, among other things, that a majority of Israelis are African, Arab or Asian.

Helen Thomas is a great American, but if she wanted to go “home,” she could emigrate to Lebanon quite easily. But for all the Jewish people she worked with and knew, and presumably liked, they can’t go home to Germany or Poland because there are no Jews left for them to mingle with. We all know why Israel exists, except for Helen.

I have said I will not pile on someone I otherwise admire, but the irony is that Arab support of Hitler helped make possible the state of things they now abhor.

If ever there was a living example of the Greek concept of tragic irony, it is Helen and her inborn fatal flaw -- unable to be hidden for more than 89 years and unable to have been overcome by some of the Jews who were her best friends.

Mug Shots

I should hate this, but I can't. It strikes me as a terrible use of the Internet, journalistic pandering, a violation of civil liberties and just plain unnecessary.

But damn, I love it!

Nero's Heroes

It isn't often that a public affairs person for the government can save a life, and, of course, I didn't do it all on my own, but there is a dog in New Jersey who is alive partly due to my comprehension that no matter how cold-hearted, no bureaucrat is gonna let a dog die on his watch.

Here is the story of Nero, a cane corso (Italian mastiff), whose owner, Patrick Bianco, later told me that this breed was famous in history as the war dogs of the Roman Empire, the guardians of Caesar! (Indeed, as I noted with obvious irony, but to no response, they didn't do that great a job.)

Anyway, Nero was bought from a breeder in Sicily and carried a hitchhiker on his voyage to the States – a Leishmania parasite spread by sand flies common to the Mediterranean.

Not long after, the dog became sick, but through the efforts of international doctors at a New York veterinary center who had the right drugs, Nero survived and prospered. In mid-April, he showed symptoms of the disease again, and Bianco arranged to have the international pharmaceutical company Merial prescribe and ship the needed drug, Glucantime, to him. But Nero got sicker and sicker, bleeding profusely from the nose, while waiting for the shipment. It arrived April 11, but it had to clear the necessary customs and FDA screening process at John F. Kennedy International Airport before the shipping company (DHL) could release it.

There it sat while a compassionate but clear-headed receptionist at Franklin Lakes Animal Hospital, doggedly pursued getting the Glucantime to Nero. Because the drug is not approved for use in the United States – leishmaniasis is barely present in America and no drug company has applied for FDA approval – it was routinely held in “detention” by customs and FDA officials until explanations could be made.

It was not made clear that this was an emergency case until receptionist Donna Pontrelli called a New York area television station. When that reporter contacted FDA at 4:55 p.m Friday evening, April 16, the agency swung into action. The case moved swiftly from the Office of Public Affairs, to the Center for Veterinary Medicine, to the Office of Regulatory Affairs to the Emergency Operations staff and then to (Mr.) Camille Mondé, FDA’s Director of Import Operations for New York City.

He came back to the office from home, got on the phone to DHL, which was closing its JFK desk for the day, ordered the drug released, and began cell phoning and texting with Pontrelli, who was waiting for the word. It came by 7 p.m. She drove two hours through the rain to pick up the Glucantime from a DHL executive who was standing by, and then drove it back to Franklin Lakes, where Nero was treated the next morning by veterinarian Jill Shiffman and began to improve almost immediately.

Although FDA must by law screen for and detain unapproved drugs to prevent adulterated medications for both humans and animals from entering the country, the agency may use enforcement discretion in emergency cases for the personal use of a product that is not available domestically. Such was the case with Nero’s Glucantime.

“We’re very pleased with the way it worked out in the end,” a grateful Bianco said.

Said an ebullient Pontrelli: “I love the FDA. We wouldn’t be where we are today without you."

FDA? Yes, where I work ... the Food and Dog Administration, at least for one night.

Persistence of Memory

Here is the obit of the rabbi at the orthodox synagogue that the article indicates I attended from 1957-1959. An unremarkable obit of its kind except for two things.

The photo accompanying it is exactly how I remember him looking at the time, and at the time he was all of 27.

And the other thing is a particular irony in the lede graf:

"Gedaliah Anemer, 78, a rabbi who led the D.C. area's oldest and largest Orthodox Jewish synagogue and was considered the chief rabbi of greater Washington, died April 15 at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring after a stroke."

Generations

I was looking at a journalism blog just now and feel a little strange after reading these back-to-back items.

NPR.org, Nelson and Rehm Snag Peabody Awards

NPR announced this afternoon that they have snagged to Peabody Awards. For comprehensive coverage of Afghanistan and the excellence of its web site, NPR.org, the 69th Annual George Foster Peabody Awards will honor NPR's Kabul Bureau Chief Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson and NPR.org for overall excellence. Additionally, Diane Rehm, host of NPR's The Diane Rehm Show from WAMU in Washington, is... read more>>

In Memoriam: David Mills

Former WaPo writer David Mills died of brain aneurysm Tuesday in New Orleans. A former newsman, Mills moved into entertainment, writing for television shows such as "NYPD Blue," "ER" and "The Wire." Mills attended the University of Maryland and most recently worked for HBO as a staff writer and co-executive producer on HBO's "Treme." He was 48.... read more>>

Soraya Sarhaddi, as I knew her, was one of my journalism students in the mid-80s. So was David Mills, who enrolled in two different classes I taught a few years earlier.

So was this Nelson fellow who gave Soraya her married name some years later. They were all fantastic students because, if for no other reason, they devoted their lives as I had to the school daily newspaper, the Diamondback. There was an implicit deal – mentioned in public last year by another student of mine, David Simon, creator of “The Wire” and “Homicide: Life on the Street,” – by which if the kids who worked like hell on the paper made even a token appearance in my evening class, they were guaranteed a B. If they did the work, an A. The point is that they learned more, by magnitudes, by doing rather than listening.

David Mills and David Simon were collaborators in raising hell on the college newspaper when I was both teaching and serving on the nonprofit board created to oversee publications so that they could be free from University administration control. This board would meet about once a month or so and demand to know WTF they were doing with the birthright of campus journalism we old guys left them. Secretly, of course, many of us were applauding their brand of journalism – and their swagger. They were later collaborators on some of the most riveting television dramas ever produced. And I mean EVER.

Mills was a pain in the ass but not in the way any college journalist should be. He was personally obnoxious to the point of repugnance, inconsiderate of people trying to help him, and through his writing then and later for the Washington Post, a fount of warped racial commentary from the perspective of a very light-skinned African American. The few times I saw him on television, or saw photos of him, he looked like he never lost the edge. He died of an aneurysm.

His death bothers me just as did the death a couple of years ago of a former professional colleague in that I just don’t know what to think or say about the passing of people I really didn’t like.

David Mills was amazingly creative as a television writer, and I hate it when talented people die young because we never know what else might have flowed.

He had a gift for dialogue and for words, in general. I wish I had better ones of my own right now.

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I'm baaaack!

After a 100-day hiatus, I am resurrecting the blog. I mean Twitter and Facebook may reach more people, but it’s hard for me to expound in verbiage THAT limited in range. Besides, I don’t think I will be as provocative as before, now that I work for the government. But that’s only because I am too tired.

I work long hours and I have started working out either at 7 a.m. or 6 p.m. in the fitness center in my building. And all that does sap the strength, if not the spirit.

It also means I don’t have time, except maybe 30 minutes at lunch, to read the morning paper. Ironically, the morning paper here, generally considered one of the better ones in the history of journalism, is too thin to spend time on but at the same time so irrelevant I don’t feel bad anymore when I realize I missed reading it on a given day.

What news I get is in snippets when I open my personal email during the day and headlines pop up, or on MSNBC in the evenings.

I keep forgetting that at this job, I have access on my computer screen to C-SPAN 1 and 2, CNN, Fox and MSNBC. Had I been watching this afternoon, I would have been startled to see Jonathan being interviewed by Andrea Mitchell, who slipped up momentarily and call him by my name!(If I could figure it out, a a short clip of the event would go here.)

Speaking of the news business, an old colleague has a book coming out that got an interesting write-up recently in said newspaper. It is further evidence of the wisdom of the editor who once told me that to sell any story it must have at least one of these five elements: Children, animals, sex, Kennedy or Nixon.

Congrats, Don Fulsom.

I Did it My Way (for a while, anyway)

The federal government has done what the greatest adversary of this blog could not do.

Shut it down.

I will not bury it, lest I lose brilliant ideas that may have flecked the nearly 500 posts I have committed in the past three years, but will suspend comment on anything of substance. I hope to find a way to preserve the archives while at the same time keeping anyone from finding them!

In case you missed the news, as of today I am on the payroll of the United States government as a spokesman for one of its significant agencies. Not the spokesman, actually more like e pluribus unum, but my boss suggested with eminent good sense that he really doesn’t want to have to defend anything beyond what he has to already.

So, let me state for the record that – like Dallas, The Bob Newhart Show and St. Elsewhere” -- each of the previous 493 postings was merely an episode in an extended dream sequence.

In the meantime, Ira R. Allen remains on Facebook and Twitter.

Teabags, Food and Drugs

OK, I blew it. The Constitution, indeed, has a preamble, but that's not what John Boehner thought he was quoting the other day. I was pressed for time because I was behind in my emails due to the fact I was in a conference all day Thursday (and Friday) and no longer have a BlackBerry, since I am no longer employed at the National Institutes of Health.

Although I hate to jinx things until I get a desk and a BlackBerry on Nov. 23, I have been formally notified that I have been hired to join the public affairs staff of the Food and Drug Administration. I will have now worked in the private, nonprofit, academic and public sectors.

Ever since I left journalism near the end of the Reagan adminstration, I have worked in media relations and public information in organizations that did very little media and had very little public impact. This will be different.

FDA regulates at least 25 percent of the U.S. economy and, under this administration, it is hiring more people (yay!) and starting to actually enforce the laws and regulations necessitated by the predations of corporate bastards a hundred years ago. This is an agency that today's teabaggers would have opposed. Of course, they wouldn't be here today because their ancestors would have been killed by infection, chronic disease, poisoned food or industrial accidents that are the price conservatives believe is worth the fight against "socialism."

I don't know exactly what my duties will be, but I am pretty sure I will be on call 24/7 for responses to news inquiries about the latest drug or food recall and other crises. And that could either be the most energing job I have held since leaving the White House beat, or it could kill me.

It will cut the time I have for blogging, and I have a sneaking suspicion this blog may have to take on an entirely different tone, dammit!

When I was a kid, most adults I knew who didn't own their own business had a job that lasted for their entire career, and then they retired. Well, retirement now is in our hands -- my pension from UPI is paid by the federal government at a grand total of $199 a month after 18 years service -- and this will be my ninth job; 12 if I count college summer jobs and 13 if I count the 10 years of teaching once a week.

That's a lot of jobs, but luckily it is no longer stigmatic to move around.

I just got my annual Social Security Statement, and it was bracing for two reasons: I began earning money before Medicare existed! And I have earned since age 17 just a shade over $1.5 million. Which seems like a lot, but isn't that much when you average it out over the decades. Still, it is above the average salary for most Americans, and I consider myself not deserving of good economic fortune but lucky. And proud to pay taxes so that others can have a chance to share in what is good about this country by having the same educational and health opportunities that I had.

But that's not the America the all-white, Jew-hating ruminants that rallied at the Capitol on Thursday want. They want the country run by Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Bachmann, Jon "Midnight Cowboy" Voigt and John "artificial-coloring-added" Boehner. They support people who hold signs like the one posted in this space yesterday and they support terrorists like Greg Evensen whose views circulated through the right-wing blogosphere are summarized as "the choice is simple, the ballot box or the bullet box."

By the way, it was reported that during that teabag protest against government-run health care, five people apparently the least fit of the species, including one heart attack victim, were treated free by government-run health care.

Edward M. Kennedy, 1932-2009

I am not the type who has, or needs heroes -- peoples whose lives and acts are inspirational -- but the ones I have had have been named Kennedy.

Today, the last is gone; no one among Ted Kennedy's extended younger family should even attempt to carry that particular torch. The talk shows and the real news media will chronicle how great a legislator and political leader he was, and it is worth noting that he said that among all the civil rights, education and labor legislation he made possible, his best vote was against the Bush war in Iraq.

It turns out that I already wrote my thoughts about Ted Kennedy two and a half years ago in this space. It is repeated here:

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Teddy and Me

Howard Cosell was at once the most hated sportscaster in American – and the most loved.

In the league of political rhetoric, Senator Edward M. Kennedy has the same profile. I got a chance to see him on Tuesday when he was supposed to have made a big speech about my new field – health. But, instead, he spoke of Iraq a day before President Bush planned to announce an escalation of U.S. forces.

Kennedy, as an avatar of progressive passion, is a frustrating character. Although he is the third longest-serving senator of all time, he can barely articulate an unscripted answer to the most basic of questions, like “Why do you want to be president?”

But when armed with a simple and elegant speech, a Teleprompter and a live audience, he can make you stand up and cheer and start looking for the nearest picket line, or break down in tears -- if you are a liberal of a certain age. The latter most certainly at his funeral oration for his second murdered brother in 1968.

In 1980, when I briefly covered a portion of his presidential campaign, I saw old women cry in Milwaukee’s Serb Hall after they reached up to the stage to touch hands as he departed for the next stop. He was off-script that night, and I will never forget him railing with red-faced indignation that while senators and representatives have free medical care, most American mothers wondered, when their babies were ill, “Are they 50 dollars sick or 100 dollars sick?”

After a stumbling, bumbling start, he was clearly the favorite of Democrats to snatch the nomination from incumbent Jimmy Carter. But Carter, operating under party rules designed to prevent a smoke-filled-room selection like Kennedy, had sewn up the entire National Education Association, whose delegates populate every single town in the country and who composed about 25 percent of the entire nominating convention.

When Kennedy conceded defeat to the throngs in the steamy Madison Square Garden, the thousands of Democrats on the convention floor could not – would not – stop cheering. Had they been able to, the Carter delegates would dumped their peanut farmer and gone for a Kennedy Restoration. In defeat, Kennedy shall forever be remembered in the annals of rhetoric for what set off that riot of affection and hosannas for what might have been.

I could be mistaken, but I think I recall that the 20-minute riot of affection for Kennedy was put to a stop only when a Carter aide signaled the band to play the national anthem.

So, I (below and in sunglasses) am grateful to have seen and heard up once
again up close on Thursday. The opportunity arose not because I cover politics anymore but as a member of the National Press Club speakers committee, I helped out at the last minute in putting together a head table on behalf of the event’s organizer (pictured both above and to the right), who was out of the country the previous week.

The organizer had first met Kennedy at Hyannisport in 1981, when he was 5 years old and accompanying his father to a Hyannisport party the senator threw for the press who covered his campaign the year before. This time, I just stayed out of the way. But I still had gooseflesh.

Dealing with the Devil

As a progressive with an interest in bringing sanity to the health care system, I do recognize that no product of the current debate will be the way I would have done things, which is cutting the cost and improving national health by eliminating insurance companies from the decision-making process.

But as a progressive, I also detest what the president and the Blue Dog Democratic curs are doing, at least according to the New York Times and Washington Post today.

Obama basically has gone back on his campaign pledges, not so much on policy, but by allowing himself to be dictated to by the lobbyists he promised to ban from the White House. According to the Times, Obama has agreed to protect the drug industry from having to engage in any future price negotiations. In other words, the drug lords have said “we will give this much” and no more, ever, and Obama is kowtowing to them in order to claim a victory.

But what victory is it when only the bad parts of a compromise remain?

According to the Post, Senate Democrats led by industry tool Sen. Max Baucus of Montana—a state in the bottom five in hypertension, diabetes and child obesity—are shaping a sell-out that would increase some taxes on insurance companies (and raise consumer premiums) while abandoning the very centerpiece of any reform. That centerpiece is the House-proposal to create a government entity that would compete on price and quality with private insurers.

In my view, that’s a political lose-lose and an example of Obama’s delusional fantasy of bipartisanship. No more than one or two Republicans will ever vote for anything identified as an administration priority.

Bipartisanship is useful under two conditions: 1) the minority party has good alternatives and 2) the minority party votes are indispensable for passage. In health care reform, a Democratic priority for 60 years, the chances are the best ever for enactment. Democrats control the House, have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a progressive in the White House.

Is there anything wrong with going for the gold and losing a floor vote, which would expose the Republicans as the anti-people party that they are? At least Obama and the Democratic Party would have tried.

Sure, it’s tough to cobble something together that meets your policy goal and can get enough votes. But throwing out your principles for the chimera of “victory” by caving in before it is necessary is not the sign of leadership.

It is just the “business as usual” that Obama campaigned against, another proof that Democrats can be bought just like Republicans can, only at a higher cost—the one thing they have that Republicans don’t: their souls.