Scott Martelle

My morning crawl around the Internet led me to a link to this blog post by Gary Switzer calling out the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Press Foundation for what seem to be some rather bone-headed ethical lapses.

The core issue: Accepting arrangements with drug companies for programs for journalists, including all-expenses trips for conferences aimed at informing the journalists about health care issues. Paid for by the drug companies.

I know the journalism world is on its heels, but wrong is wrong. And this is wrong. Read More 

I missed the first part of this story when it rumbled through earlier this month, and only caught up with it when the second yahoo bared a rather disgusting soul.

Absolutely appalling.

CrooksandLiars.com has a piece (thanks to friend Anthony DeStefanis for the steer) about two state level political figures -- one in South Carolina, the other in Tennessee -- who recently choked on their own racism. One referred to an escaped gorilla as an ancestor of Michele Obama, and the other emailed around -- on an official government account -- a racist cartoon (portraits of the presidents, with Obama as just a set of eyes against a black backdrop).

Both seem to have apologized, but not for being stone racists. The "gorilla" joker apologized to anyone who was offended. The "portraits" moron said she sent it out via the wrong email. Which, by extension, means she didn't see a problem with the inherent racism of the item.

So much for the post-racial America...
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You'll notice over to the side the little RSS icon, which you can use to load up the blog on your RSS readers. For those not familiar, it's an easy way to keep track of multiple online sources with one easy mechanism.

There are a variety of readers out there. I use Newsgater but Google has its own reader that seems to be pretty user friendly. Read More 

One of the joys of being married to an elementary school teacher is you never get rid of the school-age inspired sense that summer begins sometime in the third week of June. I grew up in the Northeast -- Scarborough, Maine, and Wellsville, New York -- and it became ingrained that the end of school meant warm weather. Even when, in reality, days began staying pretty warm in May and continued into late October.

But it's interesting how the cycles of young life stay with you. As a freelance writer, my time is pretty much my own. For example, I was up at three a.m. today to let the dog out and, unable to fall back to sleep, worked on research for a couple of hours on The Fear Within (reading back through letters from and to one of the defendants, Gil Green) then went back to bed.

And living in Southern California -- well, it always feels like summer around here. So this wonderful sense of summer is a bit Pavlovian, rooted in personal history rather than the reality of the present. Similarly, I don't miss the seasons of the Northeast (though I never minded snow) but after 12 years in SoCal I find I've lost track of time. When you're used to measuring years in quarters, and the tethers of memory are seasons ("No, we did that two winters ago"), well, life takes on a sense of suspended animation.

Which also means it flies by incredibly quickly ... but just for related fun (give it a few seconds to fire up):



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A new poll out today from the New York Times shows an interesting disconnect that should be worrisome for the Democrats. While President Obama still enjoys high personal approval ratings, the public is losing patience with his prescriptions for fixing the economy and health care.

There also is a general lack of enthusiasm for his approaches to Guantanamo Bay, and his attempts to help the auto industry.

Add to that Obama's problems with gay supporters, and the administration's persistence in maintaining secrecy despite promises of transparency -- well, there's a political collision looming out there as the aspirations of the Left, which helped put Obama in office, get short-circuited.

It's too early for this to have much effect on Obama's re-election prospects -- how these problems play out over the next couple of years will be crucial -- but this is when people begin lining up for the off-year Congressional elections. And if the public remains this skeptical of Obama's policies, the Democrats will face some serious challenges keeping controlling of the House. Read More 

My friend Frances Dinkelspiel -- another journalist-turned-historian -- has a nice Q&A on her blog today with Andy Ross, the former owner of Cody's Books in Berkeley. After he closed the shop a couple of years ago, he turned himself into a literary agent, with some pretty good results.

The most interesting part of the piece is Ross' take on the state of publishing which squares with what I've been seeing. Things aren't as bad as in newspapers, but it's still pretty tough. Especially for fiction writers. Frances asked him what is easier to sell to editors, fiction or nonfiction:

"Uhh -- well -- non-fiction is easier by a mile. Look, I don't want to rain on the parade, but look at the numbers. Publishers will only look at fiction that has been submitted by an agent. These submissions have been heavily vetted. I would imagine that out of 100 queries received by agents for novels, they might select 1 for submission (probably less). I have spoken with a number of fiction editors. They inform me that of the submissions they receive, they may decide to publish (again) 1 in 100. Just looking at the numbers, selling a novel is like winning the lottery. Of course, if you are a published author with a good track record, you are in pretty good shape. It isn't very hard to sell a new novel by Philip Roth. But if you are a published novelist whose last book bombed, it is extremely difficult. Publishers are making decisions by the numbers now. They have a data base that tells them the sales of every book on the market. Refined taste in literature plays a very small role."

So I guess the good news is the novel I've got stashed away, half finished while I work on The Fear Within, is a mystery. Not much call for refined literary taste there....  Read More 

This is always a striking -- and depressing -- web site to visit. It's an interactive map of newspaper jobs lost so far this year, with other tabs to look at losses in previous years and one tracking newspapers that have shut down altogether.

There's an irony, of course, in tracking such devastation to the industry through a free online site. Read More 

Remember back in November, when Barack Obama won the White House, a victory equally notable for its historic context as for what it supposedly said about a nation sick of politics as usual?

Well, one out of two isn't bad.

Over the past few weeks we've seen a disappointing throwback to the politics of distraction. First some online celebrity gossip asked a real question of a Miss America contestant -- her opinion on a political issue -- and instantly created a martyr for the political right. Never mind that the context for the question, and the political weight of Miss California's answer were completely meaningless (other than as a barometer of the fact that Americans do indeed disagree on some issues).

Add a dose of Dick Cheney, who has shown a remarkable inability to fade into the sunset. So much so, in fact, that one has to wonder whether he's fighting for historical legacy or aligning himself for the future -- a 2012 presidential run, bad ticker, bad polls and all. Then David Letterman cracks a bad joke about Sarah Palin's daughter and Alex Rodriguez, which Palin and conservative commentators twist out of context to extend her 15 minutes of political life.

Now John McCain is back in the fray, spinning off a foolish comment by Leon Panetta that Cheney might be wishing the U.S. gets attacked to validate his stance on the efficacy of torture. Panetta, McCain gravely informs us, must retract his comment.

The economy remains trashed; the Obama Administration has yet to address in a meaningful way the legacy of American policies that led to Guantanamo Bay, illegal detentions and torture; no progress has been made on health care reform; North Korea is nuke-rattling; the streets of Iran are teeming with protesters -- and this is what the political elite focus on?

One unavoidable reality of democracy is that we always get the political leaders we deserve. Read More 

Very cool photos from Wired Science -- and some interesting details about the recovery of a butterfly species in England. Yes, ecosystems are fragile, and the little things -- like unusually tall grass -- can have devastating consequences. Of course, you knew that, but it's reassuring to have it proven again. Now if we were just smart enough to act on it more often... Read More 

Some things just should not be contemplated before the first cup of coffee. Like "brown matter," the flow of material that some scientists and astrophysicists speculate is, in essence, a leak from our universe to the next.

So maybe H. Ross Perot was on to something more cosmic than trade policy back in the 1992 election. Read More