Jack O'Reilly circa 1936

An old friend emailed today to tell me I’ve been bumming her out with my recent posts. She asked that I end the week on a positive note.

Her note reminded me of my late uncle Jack, who for years was a radio personality on WOR Radio in New York, and then on stations in Philadelphia and Arizona (he was also a long-time NCAA track and field announcer.)

Well, one day in the late 1940’s, Jack O’Reilly got to thinking very much like my emailing friend, and convinced his station manager to invest in a new and sunny radio program called “Good News Only.” It would feature only stories that would cheer the spirits of listeners beaten down by a drumbeat of bad news.

The trouble, of course, was where does one gather these happy tales?  The AP, UPI, and Reuters wires were carrying news of Soviet expansion and mafia hits. Where was the wire for the upbeat stuff?

When Ronald Reagan was a young in-studio baseball announcer — one pretending  to be at the ballpark — he once encountered a similar conundrum.  His play-by-play tickertape suddenly stopped in his hand. That telegraph tape was the lifeline to what was actually happening on the field. It told Reagan of the balls, strikes, and hits occurring on baseball diamonds hundreds of miles away. It was Reagan’s job to bring that information to life, for the imagination of his radio audience, using whatever audio devices he had at his disposal.

So when that ticker tape stopped, Reagan had to think of something to do until it began flowing again. The next batter was a guy named Augie Galan.  Reagan, who could’t tinker with history by having Galan do anything of consequence, did the only think he could think of:  He had Galan foul off every pitch, replete with bat on ball sounds and the groans of an audience — for six minutes and 45 seconds. Thankfully, the telegraph began working again, and Galan popped out.

“Good News Only” must have taken a page from Reagan.  Or maybe my Uncle Jack and Reagan both inherited an extra dose of Irish Blarney.  Because Jack O’Reilly did for his show what Reagan did for his.  But with more embellishment.

In short, my Uncle Jack made his stories up. All of them.  On “Good News Only”, kittens were rescued from burning trees.  Children found Revolutionary War  muskets laying in the woods. An asthmatic won a contest by holding his breath for three and a half minutes. And dogs would walk across America to reunite with their owners. Such were the miracles on my uncle Jack’s show every Tuesday at 8:00, or whenever it aired.

“Good News Only” didn’t last long.  But it sure must have been nice to listen to, and even nicer to produce.

How’s that, Deb?

Here come the bedbugs again, and based on this Scientific American story, we may as well surrender.  There is nothing we can do about them short of burning down our domiciles it seems.

Who knew these little buggers were so clever?

And then we read that the 13-year Cicadas are back, at least in the American south.  Tens of billions of them.

First ticks, then bed bugs, now cicadas.  What’s next? Locusts?  (And what exactly is a locust?  Or a chigger for that matter?)

I guess we’ll soon find out.

Feeling itchy yet?

I caught a whoopin’ in early February from friends in the not-for-profit industry upset with a warning I wrote for non-profits receiving government funding. Make alternate plans for grants in the future, I advised, if you don’t provide essential — truly essential — services.

That was no great insight on my part.  Anyone who works around government knows how bad the fiscal situation is. But my words were interpreted as an attack on the not-for-profit industry, when none was intended.

In this morning’s New York Times, Michael Cooper reports that cities and states not only are reducing not-for-profit budget lines, they are now asking land-holding non-profits like hospitals, universities, and museums to voluntarily pay property taxes, where none are legally due.

It’s a double whammy for institutions struggling to keep their doors open. And it’s going to get worse.

The current state budget gaps have more to do with this recession than with the structural funding problems states face. It’s the pension debt that’s the real killer, and that will get worse every year for a long while with demographic certainty. More and more pubic servants with pregnant public pensions will be retiring each year, with fewer taxpayers available to pay their freight. Something has to give, and it’s going to be  discretionary spending. That is not opinion; it is an absolute certainty.

It is equally certain that governments asking for voluntary contributions from non-for-profits today will be demanding them tomorrow. The symbiotic relationship between the not-for-profit community and government is about to get strained, indeed.

There are approximately three million not-for-profit corporations in America today. I would wager there will be half that many in 2025.

A number of professors at Catholic University just sent a nasty diatribe to House Speaker John Boehner, a practicing Catholic who will be giving the commencement address at the University this year, questioning his religious faith for proposing federal budget cuts.

“It is good for Catholic universities to host and engage the thoughts of powerful public figures, even Catholics such as yourself who fail to recognize (whether out of a lack of awareness or dissent) important aspects of Catholic teaching.  We write in the hope that this visit will reawaken your familiarity with the teachings of your Church on matters of social justice,” the letter reads in part.

Here is the letter in full.

Funny, I got a pretty good Catholic education, and I don’t remember reading anything about government deficit spending where charity is concerned.  From what I understand, charity is supposed to begin at home.  And I suspect that my Republican great-grandfather, who headed the English Department at Catholic University, largely would have agreed with me.

It is offensive as a Catholic — however poor a Catholic I am — to have my religion cynically exploited this way. No country on earth spends more on its poor and disabled than the United States does.  We spend so much money, in fact, that we are borrowing 45 cents of every dollar we spend.  How trying to pay down the federal deficit, so that our children and their children don’t get stuck with this bill, is failing to recognize the “teachings of the church” is beyond me.

Professors have every right to pen letters to the Speaker, but they have no right to invoke Catholic dogma into U.S. budget fights.  They should be ashamed for doing it.

I wonder if these professors also sent letters to Democrats who voted for federal abortion funding…

King Bhumibol Adulyadej

The Thai Justice Ministry is recruiting “cyber scouts” to scour the Internet for any insults to the Thai Royal family, according to a report today .  Anyone caught doing it can be sent for a long stretch in the Thai Big House, although there first will be a warning.

I have nothing against King Bhumibol Adulyadej — I have never met the man — but I do like giving scouts a good challenge. So here goes: I say King Bhumibol Adulyadej has big ears.

I’ll let you know what happens…

Joel Klein included a gem of a quote from the late head of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), Albert Shanker, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed yesterday.

“When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interest of school children,” Shanker was quoted as saying.

That statement is a breath of fresh air, even though it was delivered decades ago (Shanker died in 1997.) It makes clear the priority of the UFT:  Teachers.  And there is no shame in that. Unions are supposed to represent their members.

What bothers me is when the UFT and other unions like New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) invoke children in their negotiating advertisements.  In those, it’s always about “the children” and never about the teachers.

Sample ad here.

Today, we read in the New York Post about the battle Mayor Bloomberg is having with city teachers.  He is being forced to lay off thousands of teachers because the unions will not forgo automatic pay raises mandated by New York’s pro-union Triborough Amendment to the Taylor Law.  According to the story,  spending on teachers in New York City has increased 105 % in the past 10 years because of Triborough, while increases for other city workers average 28 %.

Rather than forgo step increases to keep their fellow teachers in jobs, the UFT is demanding the automatic raises while screaming about “the children” when talk of teacher layoffs is raised. It is totally disingenuous.

I never thought I’d be saying this, but we could  use an honest voice like Albert Shanker’s today.

I sat down last night to write a few complaining words about Microsoft’s awful web browser, Bing, that is now being foisted on Blackberry users.

The thing is typical Microsoft. It’s too smart by half. It tries to do a little of everything instead of the one thing it is supposed to do well — web-browsing. (Google “Bing sucks” and see how many listings come up.)

The other night, while at a dinner, I got an alert to download an updated version of Bing to my Blackberry, so I did, thinking it might improve its heretofore bewildering performance. That was a mistake. I spent the next 20 minutes trying to stop the thing from taking over my digital life. It was asking three “application permissions” a second and preventing all other Blackberry functions — like getting email — from functioning until I said “yes, I surrender. Take my life over.” I had to do  a hard re-set of the device to make it stop. Then, out of spite, I tried to delete Bing altogether. I’d rather have no web-browser at all, I thought at the time, than this greedy, bug-filled parasite. Can’t be done. It’s a stain that cannot be expunged.

The next day I read that Microsoft is buying web-based video and telephony provider Skype for $8.5 billion. My first reaction was “there goes Skype.” But after reading more about the sale, a thought occurred that buoyed my spirits: Microsoft is panicked. It knows it is falling far behind Google and Apple, and it is willing throw a good chunk of its fortune into trying to leap ahead of them. Video communications — Skype — is where Microsoft is placing its bet.

My second thought was that Blackberry is panicked, too. It’s why they went with Bing as the default browser–a clearly inferior product– rather than Google. Blackberry has teamed up with Microsoft in a desperate attempt to head off Google and Apple at the pass.

In the end, all of this can only be good news for consumers like me who have wanted to own a Dick Tracy watch for more than 40 years, even if it means enduring a few more bug-filled years to get there.

Good old American competition.  It’s not always pretty, but it does move the world forward.

Oh, in a “duh” moment, I set my Bing home page to Google. Glad I wasn’t able to delete the thing.

http://youtu.be/ujDvLgLf48w

New York State politics, Tuesday, May 10, 2011, courtesy of YNN’s Nick Reisman.

God help the Republic.

Cell phones will be required to carry homeland security emergency text messages beginning next year, according a story that just broke. The project will begin in New York.  Seems like an excellent idea — as long as it’s not politically abused.  Monday, November 11th national security reminders?   Hopefully not.

The Obama Administration should stop talking about the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound for its own good.

With every passing day it is revealing details of the action — in a clear effort to keep the story going — that do not have to be made public. Those details are causing problems for allies and diminishing the glow of a brilliant operation for which President Obama rightly receives credit.

Today the White House reveals that standby U.S. forces were on hand to fight their way out of Pakistan if need be. That is, to open fire on an ostensible ally.

No one doubts that the US military had a back-up extraction plan — one would expect that — but do we need to detail it now, especially when the Pakistanis already are looking like fools? It is rubbing salt in the wounds of an ally, however tentative a friend she may be, for a handful of headlines.

Imagine how those headlines are reading in Islamabad today.

Details of military operations are ordinarily kept under wraps for years.  These ones should come out at a forum at the Council on Foreign Relations or the 92nd Street “Y” circa 2025.  But this White House seems determined to squeeze this lemon for every drop of juice it’s worth — to cash in every story angle – and it doesn’t seem to care about the consequences of doing so.

The President’s re-election team should know better.  Even as a practical political matter. This storyline is electoral gold, and the ads Team Obama will be able to make in October 2012 should be capable of moving the dial when it is most needed. Unless the story is burned. That is, unless it has been played to death.

That is what the White House is doing now — burning this story’s fuel and unnecessarily agitating allies in the process. It is just plain dumb.