No surprise that journalism is dying, but this is seriously freaky.

Slate recently published a hilarious and disturbing article written by Michael Kinsley, titled A brilliant new scheme for measuring the productivity of journalists. It concerns remarks made by a guy named Randy Michaels who is apparently the "chief operating officer" of the Tribune Company, which owns The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times, in addition to myriad properties unrelated to journalism (the Chicago Cubs, for instance). An excerpt:

Last week an article appear[ing] on the Web site of Editor & Publisher...reported that one Randy Michaels...intends to address the ongoing distress of the newspaper industry brought on by the Internet—distress that already has led to massive layoffs and buyouts and a major crisis of confidence if not identity at even the most prestigious and established and, one would have thought, profitable newspapers—by starting to measure the productivity of the journalists who are employed at the various tentacles of that institution.

Not such a big deal, right? Businessmen are always on the lookout for easily digestible metrics for determining "productivity," and these businessmen often convince themselves that these metrics actually mean something. Of course they don't, and they're really just ways of justifying and accounting for layoffs. But Kinsley goes on to describe the chillingly comical detail of Mr. Michaels's scheme:

Productivity will be measured by column-inches of words. In other words, the company will assume that the more words you write, the more productive you are. Or, to put it another way, if you use many, many, many words to make whatever point you may be trying to make or fact you are attempting to report, you will be considered more productive than another writer who takes pains to be concise—that is, to use fewer words rather than more words. This Michaels has apparently been sneaking around with his tape measure (or perhaps he uses an old-fashioned pica rule of the sort once favored by newspaper people during the era of the linotype machine) and has made the piquant discovery that while the average journalist at the Los Angeles Times produces 51 pages of words each year, his or her counterpart at the Hartford Courant, which is also owned by the very same Tribune Co., produces 300 pages of words each year. This is six times as many words. Or, to put it another way (and why not?), the Los Angeles Times journalist produces only one-sixth as many words as the one working in the newsroom of the Hartford Courant. Michaels is completely unabashed, in fact he seems downright proud, of this idea of measuring productivity in column-inches. He said to Editor & Publisher, "This is a new thing. Nobody ever said, 'How many column inches did someone produce?' "

For many, many years, the Los Angeles Times was known for its verbosity, or tendency to use more words than other newspapers to say roughly the same thing. More recently, this habit of writing many, many words when far fewer could make the point as well or nearly so (which is the essence of verbosity) was discouraged at the Los Angeles Times....Today's idea is that a writer should produce as many words as possible, because that means you need fewer writers to produce the same number of words.

Kinsley goes on to reveal that Michaels's plan for cost-saving also involves stripping away much of the content of his newspapers. Michaels wants to reduce the amount of space accorded to articles such that it is equivalent -- 50/50 -- to the amount of space accorded to advertising. Kinsley does Michaels one better:

This Michaels is clearly a bright man. It won't be long before he figures out that you can have an equal number of advertising and editorial pages if you have none of either and simply stop publishing the paper. That way you won't have to employ any journalists at all.

Boumediene v. Bush: The moral legitimacy & political sustainability of America (i.e.: a future for her citizens) preserved by a narrow margin.

The decision of the Supreme Court's decision in Boumediene v. Bush has preserved the commitment of the United States of America to the rule of law, albeit by the narrowest of margins.

Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion has of course provoked outraged sophistry, whiny self-righteousness and reckless hyperbole among the hired goons of the far Right. That's to be expected. Also to be fully expected is Justice Antonin Scalia's reckless, hyperbolic, whiny, self-righteous and outraged dissent. Scalia's dissent claims that Americans will certainly die as a consequence of the recognition of habeas corpus rights with respect to Guantánamo Bay detainees.

Uh. Even if Scalia's proclamation were somehow true -- which it isn't -- is Scalia asking us to accept a choice between (1) risking death as citizens of a nation that protects our civil liberties and (2) enjoying a marginally smaller risk of death as citizens of an authoritarian/totalitarian state in which our civil liberties can be brushed aside?

Scalia's not just a bully, but he's also a bully who's wrong. Moreover, he's hypocritical. For all of his rhetoric that his supposedly "originalist" jurisprudence somehow preserves political disinterestedness in Supreme Court decisions -- which he repeatedly claims to distinguish his jurisprudence from that of his colleagues -- his dissent is so brazenly political that Fox News/the Washington Times/the Weekly Standard/Rush "Pill-Popper" Limbaugh won't even need to ask their interns to "massage" the text of his incendiary remarks in order to fashion them into highly charged pieces of hard-Right propaganda. You can almost hear John Williams's fanfare-for-evil "The Imperial March" from The Empire Strikes Back.

Anyway, re the choice between liberty and life, I believe that we Americans were presented with a fantastic moral calculus in sixth grade history class:

Give me liberty, or give me death!

You know what? We should wake up and start addressing the real national security problem, which is that the Republican Party believes that the moral, legal and political authority of the United States can and should be bought and sold in times of national crisis or emergency.

Our future hinges on the durability of the rule of law, of civil rights. Without those things, all is lost. Fuck anyone who says otherwise. No one over the age of 50 had better dare to tell me otherwise, because this is an issue that concerns my future children. It's not about Scalia, nor is it about his children, nor is it about George W. Bush.

These people will all be dead and gone by the time the true ramifications of their negligence are felt, and most of their money will be gone with them. When the dust settles, the only thing that will matter to me, my loved ones, and to my children is whether or not I live in a nation of laws, in which civil liberties, due process and constitutional rights remain intact.

And so I take it very personally when Scalia mouths off about overriding these constitutional protections in order to preserve human life. Without our constitutional rights, we have no life, and we certainly can't in good faith expect to provide any kind of life for our children. Fuck you, Scalia: what about preserving my life? What about preserving the possibility of the lives of my children?

But, alas, Scalia's dissent isn't about me. And it isn't about you, Dear Reader. It has nothing to do with the document that protects us from totalitarianism and tyranny: U.S. Constitution. No, Scalia's dissent is about politics. More specifically: cultural politics. More specifically: the right of a small vanguard of ideological Executive Branch wackjobs to exercise unchecked power to break the law and violate the Constitution -- all of this under the cover of secrecy and without the slightest worry of ever having to be held accountable for chopping down the few remaining bulwarks that hold the tatters of our country aloft.

A succinct New York Times editorial gets it right: "Justice 5, Brutality 4." I had all but given up on the rag.

Seriously: why don't you read the opinion? Also, give a listen to the oral arguments, in which the razor-sharp questions posed by Justices Souter and Breyer will make you want to stand up and cheer.

Slavoj Žižek on authoritarian capitalism, other horrors.

In an interview, broadcast on Icelandic television (the date is unknown to me), Slavoj Žižek argues that the Left needs to take notice of the decoupling of capitalism and democracy, and--in the example of China, whose lead smaller states have begun to follow--the disturbing advance of authoritarian capitalism. Also discussed is biotechnology, the implications of which, he argues, traditional and current ethical discourses are ill-equipped to handle.