“The word is this may the year that comedy makes its big comeback. The networks are reportedly very high on a lot of their comedy contenders.

NBC just picked up a pilot called OUTSOURCED about an American company that outsources a lot of jobs to India. I can’t imagine they will ever top the joke in Albert Brook’s FINDING COMEDY IN THE MUSLIM WORLD when they go to a call center in India and one of the operators says, “Good morning, the White House”. But at least it’s different.”

— Ken Levine, May 2010.

I’ve been reading about the hatred a lot of Republican voters feel for Barack Obama, which is kind of amazing since he really hasn’t done anything since 2009. A story by Sam Stein asking people what it would take for them to vote for him had some very ugly things in it. Yet it seems like turnout for every GOP primary/caucus this year has been down compared to 2008, including Nevada last night. It raises some questions about whether or not the angry base is committed to actually doing something about their anger, and it makes me wonder if even these people realize that Obama is just a surrogate for their overall frustration with the government and the economy. If that’s the case, you can forget about a GOP-leaning enthusiasm gap.

The Times’ public editor wonders if the role of his paper is stenography, journalism, or a hybrid of the two. It would be frustrating if this were being debated (because the answer to that should be obvious), but it’s actually not being debated. And that’s infuriating. This story is rare and well outside of what the media normally does and sees its function as. That said, I read this and I have to wonder if a prime problem with these people is that they don’t understand what news is. Mitt Romney saying that President Obama apologizes for America (as if that were a bad thing) would be news if it were true. But it’s not true. So it’s news that Romney, who wants to be president himself and is well on his way to winning the GOP nomination, is lying about this.

Why does anyone have to question whether it’s the role of the media to report that? Forget about fact checking, or mixing stenography with a fact-checking inserts. Report things that actually are news and that would represent an important step toward restoring the media as the people’s main tool for governmental accountability.

Is that the prevailing view? And if so, how can The Times do this in a way that is objective and fair? Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another?

It’s really illuminating how badly rotted and pathetic our media has become that they really don’t know how to do their jobs anymore, and actually have to ask readers for tips. Objectivity and fairness is not relevant never has been. The role of the media is not to be fair to a politician (Romney), or professional political party (Democratic Party), or ideology (libertarian), or special interest group (Tea Party/OWS). It’s to report the truth. If the truth is that Barack Obama ended up being a sorry excuse for a liberal that loves war and has no spine, so be it. If the truth is that Mitt Romney is a serial liar with no meaningful convictions, then say that. Calling a liar a liar is not being unfair or subjective or biased. It’s journalism.

Is it really hard to turn this:

At a campaign event in South Carolina this afternoon, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told a crowd of supporters that President Obama goes around the world apologizing for America.

Into this:

At a campaign event in South Carolina this afternoon, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told a crowd of supporters that President Obama goes around the world apologizing for America. But Politifact, a non-partisan fact checking organization, found no support for these claims. Democrats have criticized these claims as false, and the Times found no support for Romney’s statements while researching this story.

Ideally followed up by this:

The Times asked several people who attended the event how such criticism ranked in comparison to other pressing matters like the stagnant economy, and persistent high unemployment. The economy consistently tops the list in polls asking Americans what the government’s top priority should be.

Journalism isn’t hard. Just do it.

Joe Konrath has posted his early January numbers for the Kindle. There’s a lot of back story to this (including a limited, controversial special promotion deal), but the numbers are amazing. $100,000 in a little over three weeks. I wonder if it’s getting to the point where the people who sold huge on the Kindle that leveraged it into legacy (print) publishing deals may already be regretting it. Amanda Hoccing sold more books than this, I believe, and then signed a four-book $2 million deal with Saint Martin’s Press. But nobody knows if she’ll be successful in print or a huge dud. That $2 million could be all she ever sees from this deal and it could be the last one she ever makes. Even dud and rejected novels on the Kindle will sell something and they’ll sell forever.

This goes to the heart of an argument that Joe has been making for some time now. You won’t get the big upfront payments (that end up taking a year or two to receive) but what you make over the next decade will far exceed the advance you’re giving up.

I took some old Writer’s Digests from the basement to go over, most from the 90s, and was struck by an interview with Richard North Patterson. He’s written a tad less than a book per year for the past 15 years, but he said he writes 8 1/2 hours per day, five days a week, and likes to get 10 manuscript pages per day. My first thought was, how can you spend that much time writing and get so little done? I’m an epic procrastinator with discipline problems, so I’m not criticizing Patterson. I honestly didn’t understand how it was possible that he could have enough discipline to write that consistently for that many hours per day, and have only gotten 15 books done.

The answer came at the end: he writes longhand. As in writing on paper.

I wonder how many more books Patterson could have written if he had learned how to type, and preferred to write that way. The 2,000 words per day minimum rule sounds like a lot more work when you have to fill 10 pages of notebook. Manual writing robs so much from you because of that. When you know how to type, your speed is limited by how quickly you can come up with the story. Being in the zone means writing very quickly and either getting done early and having most of the day left for other things, or being able to get a lot more work done in a normal amount of time.

But that’s not the case with manual writing. You’ll always be limited to how quickly you can write on the page no matter how inspired you are. Richard Patterson, with minimally competent typing skills, should be able to write 2-3 books per year, if not more.

Whatever works for you, I suppose. But what an amazing sacrifice to make just to satisfy eccentricity.

Just ran across this story a little while ago. Kasey Kahne saw a woman breast feeding at a grocery store, got grossed out like a 12-year-old, complained about it on Twitter like a 12-year-old, then said to a fan who disagreed with him “..your a dumb bitch”. I’m not a woman and have no children, but I understand that when a baby is hungry and screaming, you feed it. Period. It’s not practical or necessary to abandon your cart, walk out to the parking lot, and go home to deal with it. (Because surely someone else would whine about you doing it in your car.)

And with Kasey being one of the youngest drivers in the cup series, I would have expected him more than most people to be understanding and forward thinking about this.

But really? Attacking a fan for having the gall to disagree? How terrible.

A bit of advice for King Khane in the future: if you’re going to call someone else dumb, first learn the difference between your, which is a pronoun showing possession, and you’re, which is a contraction for you are. As in, you are an asshole, Kasey Kahne. And stupid to boot.

I found this tweet from Politico illuminating:

In Iowa, it’s easy to differentiate the poll leaders from the rest — the front-runners don’t do 99-county tours: politi.co/uqtjrS

Doesn’t that succinctly explain what’s wrong with politics? The candidates who have no chance to win are the ones who go to every county in a state, talk to as many voters as they can and convince everyone to vote for them.

The candidates who have a shot at winning or are the presumptive winner don’t bother to sell themselves to all voters, just the “most important” ones who end up being people in swing districts, big money donors, and influential voting blocs (e.g. special interest groups that doesn’t represent everyone.) And we wonder why we always get stuck with politicians who don’t give a shit about any of us.

I’m not at all surprised to hear what caused Keith Olbermann to stop replying to people on Twitter. I loved Countdown and respect the man professionally, but he was a huge asshole to just about everyone I ever saw him respond to on Twitter. So much of his time interacting with people was spent belittling people for not having very many followers or being stupid. You could just tell that with an extra 140 characters to expound, he’d eventually get to calling people basement dwelling losers with no girlfriends and all the usual tripe you see from people with inflated egos.

I’ve seen it from Kevin Smith a lot too, but not as much. Neither seem to understand how awful it looks to totally dismiss people based on their follower account instead of some rational disagreement. But it’s so much worse than that. They don’t seem aware that most of their followers are either abandoned accounts that were used maybe for a week or two at most before sitting idle for years, or are people who follow like 20,000 other accounts and used Twitter purely as a status symbol.

And both of them got most of their followers by appearing on Twitter’s old suggested user list. Getting on that list — typically reserved for existing celebrities who were the last people in the world that needed and deserved the spotlight — guaranteed hundreds of thousands of followers, and even a million. But they were fad followers, not people truly interested in what you’re saying and wanting to engage and share with you.

That’s really absurd for Smith especially. He’ll go on for hours about how much he doesn’t care about other people’s opinion of him and how nobody should care what other people think. They should just live their lives because they’ll never change anyone’s mind. Sage and wise, except then he’ll spend hours a day on Twitter telling people how much their opinion doesn’t matter — at all — because that person has 50 followers and he has 1.9 million.

Far be it from me to tell other people what Twitter is for and how they should use it, but I think if you feel compelled to tell other people how little their opinion matters while standing on a stage, it’s probably time to get off for a while.

I’m a huge believer in unions and them being absolutely critical to a thriving middle class and free society. But I couldn’t care less about the fights between the NFL/NBA player unions and the NFL/NBA. It’s 1%’ers fighting with other 1%’ers over who will get the biggest share of hundreds of millions of dollars. Did you know the league minimum in MLB is like $365,000 per year? That’s essentially “minimum wage” for a player in baseball. Nobody in the entire professional sport makes less money than that. An entire household earning $250,000 per year puts it in the top 1.5% of all homes in America, and you literally can’t earn less than $350,000 per year in baseball all by yourself.

There may have been a time when unions had a place in sports, but that time has come and gone. This is not what unions were meant for. Unions give you a voice to demand a safe workplace, like not having to suck in toxic fumes and touch toxic chemicals, to give you a wage you can live on instead of being slave labor like in China and India. Not to help a bunch of millionaire celebrity athletes fight with billionaire team owners over hundreds of millions of dollars.