My new project, mediabistro.com's Fishbowl D.C., a blog that covers the media and journalism in Washington has launched.
A quote from the opening entry: "Over the coming days, weeks, and months, Fishbowl D.C. will focus its gaze on the true power brokers of Washington--the reporters for whom a trip on Air Force One is a regular ordeal, the editors who decide what makes A-1 and what makes A-34, the Sunday morning talkers who like to claim to set the agenda, and the round-the-clock cable news buzz that more and more dominates political discourse in America."
Be forewarned, I'll be doing most of my blogging over there now....
I'm going to be posting much less here in the coming weeks as I have a new fun project that's eating up my time. Stay tuned here for more news on that.
I got a pleasant surprise yesterday: A brand new, top-of-the-line 14" 1.2 GHZ G4 iBook with a 60GB HD and 768 MB of RAM. Actually, I got two pleasant surprises. The first was the computer, the second was setting it up.
While I've been a long-time Macintosh devotee—my old iBook is just two months shy of its fourth birthday, and I had two iMacs and an LCIII before that—Apple won me over in an entirely new way yesterday.
Thanks to the beauty of the iBook's Firewire support and the ease of the Apple setup program, I was able to move my entire 20GB hard drive contents from old to new, and upgrade Office X to Office 2004—switching over 4 email accounts and, in the process, importing over 163,000 email messages (that's just post-college) and nearly 2,000 address book entries—with not one problem or lost piece of data. At the end of all of it, guess how much re-customization I had to do for my new computer?
One thing: I had to rechoose my desktop photo. Everything else was done for me—including the customization of my dock, Finder windows, iTunes playlists, song ratings, and play counts, iPhoto albums, unread Newsfire feeds, iChat icons and names, and Entourage folders and email accounts; every password was moved over; and every document was in exactly the same place. Apple is amazing. Plus the new computer is beautiful, bright, and fast.
Add to this the issue that I've never had a virus or had my computer weighed down by spyware, and I ask myself: Why does anyone have a PC?
Boy, when your own puppets begin to question your decisions, you're really in trouble. More awful news out of Iraq today. The governor of Baghdad (!) and five U.S. troops were killed by insurgents. It looks like things have gotten so bad that the president of Iraq wants someone to step in and take away the decision-making power of the U.S. (emphasis mine):
The steady violence prompted Iraq's interim president, Ghazi al-Yawar, to urge the United Nations to look into whether Iraq should go ahead with the scheduled Jan. 30 elections."Definitely the United Nations, as an independent umbrella of legitimacy, should really take the responsibility by seeing whether that is possible or not," Mr. al-Yawar, a Sunni Arab sheik, told Reuters in an interview.
"On a logical basis, there are signs that it will be a tough call to hold the election," he said, in comments that pulled back from a statement he made on a visit to Washington in December, when he and President Bush reinforced their message that elections must go ahead as scheduled, despite the violence.
Even the Iraqi president can see that the U.S. is, despite everything, still pushing ahead blindly to meet ill-fated and misguided ideological parameters in Iraq. The election, which they long ago decided would be held "in" January, they finally set for January 30th—as late in the month as possible in the hope that a miracle would happen. As my mother joked, "I'm sure they would have set the election for January 75th if they could get the extra days."
Now that that decision has been made, they're going to stick to it—even when everyone else involved, including the election observers, poll workers, the candidates, and the parties themselves, thinks it's a bad idea. As today's quotes show, they're increasingly willing to speak out. It's almost like they realize their lives and their country might depend on getting this thing back on track....
Todd, I'm thinking of you.
I've watched the slow collapse of U.S. Airways with frustration over recent years. Coming from Vermont, where U.S. Airways has long been the dominant carrier out of Burlington, and generally being a child of the Northeast Corridor, where U.S. Airways' shuttles have made it easy to jet set up and down from Boston to Washington, most of my frequent flier miles are on the successor of the storied Piedmont Airlines. I think I was in high school before I realized that they weren't the largest carrier in the country, because by golly every time I flew somewhere it was on then-U.S. Air.
So I don't want to see U.S. Airways go under for personal or symbolic reasons, but boy oh boy did they make a mess out of Christmas. Ten thousand misplaced bags, hundreds of canceled flights, and, says the Washington Post, at least one bride-to-be who saw U.S. Airways lose her wedding dress. You can't come up with worse publicity than all that.
The dozens (hundreds?) of employees who participated in the seemingly organized sick-out violated an important rule: You just don't mess with Christmas. You get no sympathy from anyone for making a celebratory time into a living hell. And the once-proud unions now look ridiculous for saying that there was no organized labor action or sick-out. Yea right.
I'm normally a big union person—our firm works closely with the largest and fastest growing worker's organization in the country, and I remember how proud I was to stand with the Painters and SEIU's purple people during the Dean campaign. You will not find more honest, hard-working Americans anywhere. In that vein, I believe that workers badly need to organize and that our country needs strong, vibrant unions for so many reasons. In one of my favorite Molly Ivins quotes, she wrote:
Labor is not just about the union movement. It's about all American workers. Although it is true that only about 20 percent of American workers are in unions, that 20 percent sets the standards across the board in salaries, benefits and working conditions. If you are making a decent salary in a non-union company, you owe that to the unions. One thing that corporations do not do is give money out of the goodness of their hearts.
Unions are the backbone of the American economy, and I know that it must be frustrating for U.S. Airways' employees to give back so much in the way of good pay and benefits in the face of competition from non-union low-fare competitors. (Perhaps if the airline employees were organized a little more smartly, they'd have been able to negotiate better deals, but that's another story.) The way to compete against that is to show that your union employees can provide better customer service and make flying an enjoyable and easy experience. Don't cut off the nose to spite the face.
In the end, though, this effort by the unions has backfired and will likely drive U.S. Airways even deeper into the hole. For me, I think I'll go ahead and cash in my frequent flyer miles while there's still an airline around to fly me.