Friday Funday: All We Want Is A Brand New Death Star

About this time of year every year, even though our staff members are all fully-grown adults, we usually begin to notice that special holiday spark in ourselves. It's like our inner children coming out to play, as we begin to think about the toys and games of our past. This annual change of mindset seems to be a common effect that crosses borders, languages, and religions too.

Call it the spirit of the season, or the Santa effect.

That's not to say that all of humankind is suddenly acting like happy, well-behaved cherubs this month. There are still plenty of people playing politics right now, just in Washington, DC. The fiscal curb talks remain at a standstill, as the GOP continues their farcical attempts at looking like Santa, while acting like Scrooge.

There was also what we believe was an amazingly wise and unselfish act on Thursday, as Ambassador Susan Rice withdrew her own name from consideration for Secretary of State. She clearly chose to put the best interests of the nation above her own ambitions - something we're pretty sure earns her a spot on Santa's "good" list.

As Jonathan Bernstein noted almost immediately after Rice's announcement, "Absolutely everyone who voiced any objection (conservative lawmakers and media, for instance) will have an interest in claiming that he or she was the one who derailed the nomination. Doesn’t make it true." Last night's sad and disgusting cable news coverage of Rice's actions proved this true.

Ambassador Rice remains strong-willed and determined, and more than qualified for the position of Secretary of State. She was certainly not scared away by the propagandists on Fox or the blowhards on right-wing radio.

She may have been a bit concerned about Americans, however, who made it clear this week, in a legitimate official national petition, that they know exactly what they want for the holidays, for America: A brand new, real-life, moon-sized Death Star, just like in the Star Wars movies.

While we may be kidding about the Ambassador's motives, we are not kidding about the Death Star.

An official petition, created on the White House's official "We The People" petition website, has now gained more than 25,000 signatures, urging the Obama Administration and Congress to begin construction of a real-life, planetary-sized weapon by 2016.

Unlike the GOP's proposals on the fiscal cliff, the real-life Death Star proposal by a semi-anonymous "John D." from Longmont, Colorado has more than a few details, facts and numbers, thanks in large part to the economics blog Centives.

Earlier this year, the folks at Centives sat down to figure out exactly how much it would cost to build a real "Death Star," in current dollars, and what kind of a timetable it would take for humankind to accomplish such a massive engineering feat.

You can check out the details yourself, both on the wacky proposal, and the exact proposed specifications of the man-made planetoid. While our inner children giggled at the thought of actually being able to visit a real-life Death Star - like a space theme park, filled with lightsabers and R2D2s - we were all taken aback by the estimated completion time for such a project.

As Michael Binkley might say, a Jedi knight doesn't wait 15 years for a sequel, let alone 833,315 years for a Death Star.

Maybe we'll just have to set our holiday expectations a bit lower this year. Like gift cards for the staff to Bed, Bath, and Beyond - or Toys R Us.

Lego Death Star anyone?

Shooting The Messengers

As we've been getting ready for some of our year end activities, our staff members have been doing something most of us in the media do at this time of year - organizing and compiling stories with similar subjects from the past year, while trying to make some sense of the year as a whole.

As we noted back in October, just before Superstorm Sandy smashed into New Jersey and New York, our American media landscape has taken some serious blows this year. As we noted then, "digital journalism" jobs continue to increase in number, even while overall media jobs continue to shrink.

Just recently, we saw even more of our industry colleagues gutted in what's seemingly become an annual pre-holiday mass firing by media behemoth Clear Channel. As cruel and gutless as that annual practice has become, however, someone else in the media has sunk even lower.

Jim Romanesko posted on his website Wednesday, that the management at the Kansas City Star forced two reporters to engage in a Donner Party-like exercise this week, when Star management told experienced reporters Karen Dillon and Dawn Bormann that one of them had to leave the paper - and that the reporters had to decide themselves who survived.

If there is a more gutless, cowardly way of managing journalists, we're not sure we want to know what it is.

With the Tribune Media Company about to emerge from bankruptcy, and the legendary Cleveland Plaindealer suffering its own cuts while trying to stay a daily newspaper, we're aware this isn't the easiest time to work in the media. That doesn't mean there isn't a job to do.

One of the largest stories that few seem to want to regularly deal with is the potentially long-term drought affecting nearly two-thirds of the interior of the United States. A major report yesterday made it clear: In less than half a century, the main source for water for 40 million Americans, the Colorado River, could effectively dry up. The scientists' initial idea? Tap the Missouri River, which also supports millions of Americans.

Two other major news stories that popped up this week also didn't receive nearly the coverage they should. Attorney General Eric Holder proposed that America should finally have one single voting standard for national federal elections - which could seriously eliminate false claims of voter fraud, while adding millions to the voters rolls. Meanwhile, it appears the Republican leadership in the U.S. House is attempting to quietly take apart the House ethics process - which, as Jonathan Bernstein noted was installed after the last time Republicans ran the House.

These stories all need seasoned members of the media to continue following them and reporting on them - not just untrained digital stenographers or fools who think merely blogging makes them a journalist.

There ARE other ways to make money for media companies, from gutting the salaries and benefits of overpriced executives, to selling their properties to smaller groups of investors - which would have the added benefit of diversifying the media. Sadly, most media executives have only shown a continued desire to hurt themselves and the corporations they run by getting rid of the people who actually make those companies successful - the workers.

The fact is, continuing to gut the people who do the real work, when so many have already cut their staffing back beyond ethical and honest levels, is simply no longer an option, if media companies expect to have any kind of serious future.

Senseless Violence

We've long believed that it's best to avoid making decisions in the heat of anger. If you make a decision while you're angry, you run a larger than normal risk of your decision being a poor one. Unfortunately, like so many other axioms on anger and violence, this one is ignored far too often.

Most of the attention in the media today - including ours - will be focused on three incredibly heinous acts of violence that took place Tuesday. Sadly, we expect that few of our colleagues, if any, will make the same connections we're making today.

There was the random act of violence yesterday at the Clackamas Town Center mall in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area on Tuesday evening. Three people - including the shooter - died when the gunman ran into a mall with a semi-automatic rifle and opened fire. We can guarantee that most of the media outlets that choose to talk about this incident today will be talking about it exclusively in terms of gun violence. No history of the shooter, no discussion of mental illness, or poverty, or any other factors that lead to this latest disaster will likely be the core focus.

No, the majority of these debates will turn into little more than screaming matches that serve little purpose other than raising our blood pressure. This is the sixth time this year we've faced the topic of gun violence in this digital space. There's little more that we can say about the topic that we haven't already said again, and again, and again, and again, and again.

The second major incident that caught our attention was the premeditated act of violence against the rights of millions of workers in Michigan by that state's duplicitous Governor, Rick Snyder. Even in the midst of over ten thousand of angry Michiganders flooding the Michigan state capitol on Tuesday - and his own comments earlier this year that now prove he's a liar - Gov. Snyder signed a bill striking a massive blow against workers in his state.

As we noted in our Tuesday edition, extremist Republicans have awakened an angry lion by their actions in Michigan. Between GOP extremists attempting to incite violence at the protests, and the Teamsters president James P. Hoffa literally predicting civil war in Michigan, we have no doubt that the only thing that will be passed by Gov. Snyder and his cronies in Michigan the next two years will be gas. If the job of a governor is to govern, Snyder has effectively castrated himself politically. We doubt Snyder's concerned with that, however. Like Jim DeMint, it's likely Snyder has a cushy position waiting for him with Koch Industries once he’s thrown out of office.

It's too bad Snyder and extremist Republicans preferred to satisfy their senseless visceral urges instead of doing the job they were hired to do, of governing.

The third act of violence we noticed Tuesday was a surprise act of violence, as North Korea fired a long-range missile in the general direction of its neighbor South Korea. The missile ended up being a satellite launch - which is effectively an intercontinental ballistic missile - albeit one that North Korea didn't tell any of it's neighbors it was firing. The insanity of the action speaks for itself.

All three acts of violence - along with the continued and ever-escalating insistence by Republicans that they're going to blow up the U.S. economy unless the President and Congressional Democrats give in to their infantile tantrums - have one thing in common.

Denial runs through them all.

If Americans actually cared about reducing preventable deaths from random gun violence, we would enact sensible gun control. If Snyder and the extremist Republicans in Michigan cared about their citizens, they wouldn't have violently steamrolled through their anti-worker legislation. If the North Korean regime cared about its people, they'd stop their insane nuclear weapons program. If Congressional Republicans cared about governing responsibly, they'd realize trying to tank the U.S. and world economies will only end in their demise as a political party.

There are some days that make us just want to pull the covers back over our collective heads, and go back to sleep until all the insane people are gone.

Yesterday was one of those. Let's hope today is better.