DoD Gets Its Way

Three stories of note today for something I wrote about previously. The Congress is dealing with the health care bill, saving Cash for Clunkers, and defense spending, all at once, prior to going on recess at the end of the day today. Defense spending was approved yesterday, and SecDef Robert Gates's excellent budget plan was essentially thrown out, save for the F-22 "Raptor" fighter jet program.

$636 Billion Defense Budget
Obama had warned them
House Dems Caved



President Eisenhower once said in his farewell speech that the nation had to be aware of the "Military-Industrial Complex;" In other words, the vast network of lobbyists that have Congress' ear when it comes to approving defense projects and getting pet projects for Senators or Representatives' home districts. For example, say John Murtha (D-Pa) wants to get a contract to build engines for the F-35 fighter jet in his home district so that he can get a few hundred people employed. While that's not a terrible thing to get jobs for your constituents, it's a problem when the committee you chair pushes earmarked defense spending to, say, Northrup Grumman, because the lobbyist that asked for it has them as a client.

Oh, wait, that actually happened.

I was watching an episode of "The Simpsons" recently, from Season 6 -- "Bart's Comet." The comet is threatening Springfield, so the Congress assembles in Washington to pass a bill to help them, but before it's called for a vote, a Senator raises his hand and makes a motion to attach some unwanted earmark to the bill. Then they all hate it and vote the bill down. Cut back to anchor Kent Brockman, who says, "Democracy. Doesn't Work."

Who Knew A Nonprofit Could be Awesome?

Take a few moments and dig around the following websites:

americanprogress.org
campusprogress.org

TIME Magazine dubbed them "the most influential group at this moment in history" recently.

I would dub them one of the more awesome nonprofits out there. The "internships" page had me laughing out loud at some of the information they willingly put on there.

When the World Looked Up

Lots of moon-landing related material on the interwebs today, but it doesnt feel quite the same since Cronkite is gone. He covered it the best of any journalist at the time, but what's important to remember about the moon landing is that it is seen as man's greatest achievement. People often forget that it was essentially brought on by the national will to beat the Russians at something, and before the Apollo program, NASA was a joke. But the men they found to conquer the new frontier were giants among men, and deserve all the credit in the universe for their courage.

Tonight Discovery Channel has the miniseries about the Apollo program with the new landing footage, History Channel has a new docudrama, and TCM is showing the great space exploration films, including my personal favorite "The Right Stuff."

Take a moment to look up at that rock tonight, and imagine when man touched its surface.

He Told the Truth

Walter Cronkite was my favorite TV journalist, and I hate that he's gone. The castle of professionalism that was CBS News was started by Murrow, and made immortal by Cronkite.

In the newsroom in the sky at 92 :(

Where'd Michigan Journalism Go ?

Where'd Michigan Journalism Go ?

By Kevin Bunkley

A year removed from the University of Michigan and subsequently The Michigan Daily...the job market for young writers is one from hell. Publications are closing up, tenured staff are re-interviewing for jobs someone half their age -- and salary -- could do, and here I am stuck in the middle with my hat in my hand waiting for that phone call. As I've navigated this search, however, certain things have entered my mind, and one thing consistently bothers me. Am I at a disadvantage because I come from a school with no formal journalism program? It wouldn't seem so, but, once upon a time Michigan did have a journalism program. It was before most people reading this were born, but it did exist. A return of a formal journalism program may just help others who come after me get a job when they get that block M diploma. The Daily plays a role, but the administration must recognize that even Daily staffers want some teaching from experienced professionals.

What happened to Michigan's journalism program? The only evidence I ever heard about it was when Michigan State Journalism Professor, and University alumnus Joe Grimm told me that he obtained a Bachelor's in journalism in 1975 from Michigan. It's a mystery as to why the University phased out its undergraduate journalism program, but The Michigan Daily was clearly a more viable way to encourage journalism on the campus with no financial cost, since The Daily is independently run by a board.

This decision has negatively affected mine and others' experiences for learning journalism. Yes, The Daily is essentially a regular newsroom and actual writing experience is far more valuable than sitting in a classroom, but that only goes so far. An editorial board member such as myself does not do reporting that often, so a journalism program would have been the perfect supplement to learn ethics, multimedia and how to get a job after graduation. However, I was pleased to learn of UM-Flint starting a journalism program in May. It focuses more on online journalism, but one thing is important: the students wanted it, and the administration yielded. If there was enough interest among students at the Ann Arbor campus, I would hope the administration would be as supportive.

I have no factual information as to why the journalism program was eliminated, but I have a theory. From what Mr. Grimm wrote to me in the email in which I first learned of this extinct degree, I believe the program was a casualty of the times it lived in. Graduates of Universities from 1973-1976 experienced a terrible economic recession. The policies of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter exploded inflation and unemployment rates, and state funding for its public universities was in a pinch. The University of Michigan almost certainly had to eliminate some academic majors, so journalism was likely one of those that was cut to balance the budget. I imagine that thereafter, The Michigan Daily picked up the slack as soon as the economy improved in the Eighties, and the Board of Regents probably never saw any reason to bring the journalism program back.

Two things must happen so that everyone who isn't a straight reporter doesn't have the same difficulties I have been plagued with: The University must either consider reinstating the program in full, or else lobby the Knight Wallace Fellows to start a program that allows a group of students to interact with the journalism pros that come here each Winter to improve their craft. At the very least I would have jumped at the chance to have a journalism minor that was overseen by the Communications Department, one of the most lacking departments in the entire University -- its reputation for easy courses to fill credit hours is not undeserved. The second is that students themselves need to ascertain whether there is enough mass interest for such a program, because if it is only half full that doesn't serve a purpose, The Daily far surpasses a half-strength official field of study. I implore all the persons who regularly read The Daily, but have thought themselves too unprepared to join the staff, to think about whether they would pursue a degree in journalism.

There are thousands of good writers walking around this campus, and if the University wants to better equip all of them to be effective American citizens, they'll look into restarting a journalism major in the interest of claiming a major role in providing a dying industry with a tidal wave of new talent that is just begging to be hired like I am.

Equality in College Hockey

Equality in College Hockey

This postseason the Michigan hockey team had an early exit from the NCAA tournament at the hands of the Air Force Academy, effectively closing Yost Ice Arena for the year. Only seven months until the Wolverines are back on the ice, but there's a revenue stream the University is overlooking. We could still be enjoying college hockey this year if it weren't for a glaring hole in the list of varsity sports supported and funded by the University Athletic Department. Many universities have it but Michigan does not: a women's college hockey team. There may be informal club teams, but wouldn't it be more appropriate if a second Michigan hockey team was occupying Yost Ice Arena after the Men's Hockey team finishes their season? The main benefit of course being that the University itself gets to attract a whole new demographic of students, and strengthens diversity on campus and could serve as a model for major college athletics for women everywhere. It's the least the University could do when it's trying to scrounge up interest in what I call the "other" sports, meaning, anything that's not football or basketball.

Major women's hockey programs are not unprecedented in NCAA athletics, but not on quite the same stage as Michigan's. The Big Ten has two major programs, and the NCAA has total oversight of awarding a national champion, and instead of the traditional conferences there are Associations just like in Men's Hockey. Minnesota and Wisconsin have nationally-recognized programs, and Wisconsin won the 2009 National Championship back in March, but why doesn't Michigan have a program?

Consider a scenario: Athletic Director Bill Martin authorizes funding for a varsity-level Women's hockey program. Said program joins the WCHA, and Martin pulls away one of Red Berensen's assistants or someone from another program. Suddenly an entirely new group of high school graduates are compelled to apply for the University with the hopes of playing hockey on the national level for a power school that has the name weight of the University of Michigan. Athletic recruiting has always been an enrollment tool for this University, and adding another varsity-level sport can only improve the diversity and quality of the student body.

I view this as another showcase for the University. Attendance at many women's sporting events -- and even men's -- is lower than what it should be (with the exception of women's softball). The athletic department only needs to offer tickets to a women's hockey game for half price when a student or alumnus buys a ticket to Yost Ice Arena to see the men's team. Granted there are certain logistical issues with use of Yost Ice Arena at the tail end of the season, but the University always works those things out. They've done it with Crisler Arena for men's and women's basketball.

My family has a line of enrollment at the University, starting with my father, and I have one cousin who would love to attend Michigan, but she is not too keen on going to a school where she can't play hockey. She has repeatedly told me she would instantly apply to Michigan next year if they offered more than a club hockey team. If one extrapolates that out beyond my family circle, the University has glaring holes in its appeal. There are thousands of people who would love to come to Ann Arbor, but can't make that commitment due to the University not offering an athletic sport or an academic field. This issue goes beyond ice hockey, and if the University is so concerned about maintaining a high level of diversity in the student body, post-Proposal Two, it should think of expanding its offerings to bring in more students. It can't survive on the merit of simply being "Michigan" forever, it has to constantly improve or change its image to adapt to the needs of potential students. A women's hockey program is a small microcosm of what it must do. When it makes those kinds of changes, a thousand "my cousin"s will come flocking to the best puclic University in the country.

Latest Reading List

The internet is a wonderful place, and here's a list of some of the recent gems I regularly read:

Nifty "Star Wars" webcomic
James Fallows's blog
Game | Life
The Feed
Politico 44
Political Bulletin
Robert Schlesinger
The Opinionator
Larry Kudlow
Joystiq
Kotaku

The (Virtual) Iraq Question

I forgot I had this post in a draft...

This was in Newsweek about a month ago...and I'm planning on writing a larger piece about it, possibly even in defense of the item.

Dan Ephron writes about a videogame being developed that recreates the battle in Fallujah during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

It's definitely a First Amendment issue, and I think I'm OK with this game developer doing this...it's not that much different than the 12,000 World War II games that have been made since "Medal of Honor" first showed us that it was possible to create an appropriate game depicting a real-life horrific event.

One of the Best in the Business

Michigan was blessed to have the courageous Bob Woodruff give the commencement address last year, and it was the first time I became aware of what a good reporter he is...I hadn't watched him very much while he was the lead ABC News anchor before his horrible injury, but he seems to trumpet the harder stories, to make the public aware of things that need to be reported on (soldiers returning from Iraq with brain trauma or PTSD).

Well, Woodruff has gone back to Iraq on a tour with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (much more relevant gig than his weird special about Earth in the year 2100).

Back Into the Hornet's Nest

When Will They Learn

NCAA 10 comes out tomorrow -- usually it comes out towards the end of August, they must be getting better at tweaking the previous year's version -- and two things come to mind: why won't EA fix some of the glaring things that don't make it feel like a college football game, and why isn't there any competition for a college football game?

My biggest pet peeve for the NCAA games is the sounds of a college football game that they put into...the game. Crowd noise has always sounded pretty good and realistic, but not until the last few years have they added particular crowd chants, but they sound terrible...like a slow-motion cheer. I played the demo of '10 just yesterday, and in the Florida-Oklahoma game, the crowd cheered, "Boooomer Soooooner," only it sounded like it was being played on a cassette player. This is pretty inexcusable considering EA has been making/updating this game since 2001 (When Charles Woodson was on the cover), and doing it on next-gen consoles since 2006. And the other glaring error that I have considered writing many-a letter to EA about, is how the fight songs sound. They are cheap, slow, emotion-less recordings pulled off of a computer, and they sound like crap. "The Victors" sounds particularly bad because it's nowhere near as
fast as it actually is, and it feels like listening to a MIDI recording on a Nintendo or something. For the last several editions, they've even reused most of the commentary, so I've come to be able to predict exactly what Nessler, Corso and Herbie say on particular plays.

The solution is easy: one or two other companies need to get into the college football game business. 2K Sports makes everything else, why can't they make college games? EA has such a monopoly on the NFL and NCAA that they stifle anyone else from trying to compete.

The question becomes: Will the Forcier be with NCAA '10? I think not.

I won't be buying another edition of NCAA Football until EA gives half a crap to make it representative of the college football experience.

Our Congress at Work

I wouldn't want to be the people that have to write government legislation, because the sheer activity of reading it (same goes for the President's budget) is excruciatingly painful.

On June 24th our the House passed the Waxman-Harkey Climate Bill, HR 2454: American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. Why they threw security in there is kind of strange, maybe they wanted a bit of continuity from the Bush years...

The entire bill has been released to the public, and here it is. A lot of it doesn't make sense to me, but I'm not a politician. By the time it was passed in the House, they had stripped it down so much or made provisions to the bill, it's a shell of what it could have been in terms of changing energy policy.

Some things are good, some things are confusing, and some things are dumb. Instead of getting a Green New Deal, it seems we got a Green Almost-New-Deal.

The Last Great SecDef

Via my other blog:
Donald Rumsfeld wishes he had a shred of this man's integrity.

Robert McNamara died overnight at the age of 93.

I always liked McNamara. He was one of those Washington figures that almost everyone respected, and some liked him more than President Johnson. It's rare that a man serves in the same position for two consecutive administrations, but McNamara was Secretary of Defense for Kennedy, and then Johnson when he assumed the office, and his full term in 1964. Vietnam War policy didn't change all that much until Richard Nixon, and it was McNamara who came up with the plan of attack against North Vietnam. What sets him apart from most war hawks, especially Vietnam-era war hawks, is that McNamara recognized in 1967 that the war was going to end badly, and pushed for a troop freeze and an end to bombing North Vietnam. Johnson hated this, as did the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and McNamara resigned that November.

The most terrifying thing that haunted McNamara, and could have caused him to rethink the war was this: he witnessed one morning a man who would later be identified as a Mormon farmer that had driven all the way to Washington, standing on a ledge outside McNamara's office window...and he doused himself in gasoline and lit himself on fire while holding his infant child, and threw the child to screaming onlookers as he died.

McNamara was haunted by Vietnam, and he tried to exercise his demons, but he never fully escaped the guilt he felt by inflicting so much destruction on a country that just wanted what America had once fought for themselves.

In 2003 this documentary won an Academy Award, and deservedly, because Robert McNamara had 2 hours to explain to America why he failed, and the tears in his eyes throughout the film are indication that he never quite wanted the political life that had been thrust upon him.



The connection to the state of Michigan is fitting for McNamara's middle name (Strange). He became the President of Ford Motor Company in 1960, and was actually good at the job. He lived in Ann Arbor, and appreciated the University of Michigan community (oh if only he had become a guest professor)...but shortly thereafter President Kennedy came calling...

Google

The Google Democracy

By Kevin Bunkley

In an era of liberal government and blank-check spending, business is often the first casualty. Not so with the nation's most beloved internet company, Google. Since its IPO in 2004, Google has added an infinity of o's to its name. Critics often warn of some doomsday-like event in which Google unites with the federal government to penetrate every waking moment of our lives, and everything in them is sold to us by Google. I had my money on Microsoft becoming "Big Brother" first, but as Google grows, and grows...and grows, some would have you think this is bad for business and bad for our lives. In the age of globalization, a bigger Google can only further plug America, and the rest of the world, into each other.

Google's market value and subsequently, market share, is larger than Time Warner, Viacom, its subsidiary CBS, and The New York Times Company. They have every internet service imaginable, a cellular phone, and, in my estimation, the most important advertising operation in the world, AdWords. Competitors -- chiefly Microsoft and Yahoo -- warn of a monopoly business in violation of antitrust laws. Is that why the two companies just signed a ten-year deal to join their laggard search technologies to grab that market share back...after Yahoo's own project with Google was canned by the federal government?

The June issue of Wired magazine, had an article detailing Google's ascent to the powerhouse of online content and advertising and just how the company makes its money. In short, a complex mathematical formula causes a continuous cycling of the advertisements that are being clicked, and opens it up to bidding amongst the companies that want our dollars. Stimulating competition for ad prominence is an economy in itself, and it put a hole in the traditional model of going to an agency to buy ads in newspapers or online. Flattening the playing field has never been in the interest of too much power, but in the interest of advancing how commerce is conducted. The fact that an search engine start-up came up with this before Madison Avenue executives did is an indication that Google may have certain financial advantages in the modern economy.

These divisions have all the makings of a company that is beyond its reach. "Google's mission to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible
and useful,' so charmingly visionary in a startup, now sounds to some
people downright predatory in a company of nearly 12,000 employees," wrote Rob Hof in a 2007 Business Week piece. Corporate innovation is cyclical. IBM was at the front of the computer revolution, Microsoft at the integration age, and now Google is helming the internet phase. It's impossible to argue that a company that has made using the internet far more simpler than it was, has become too big and powerful. The only things that can limit Google are people who don't want to join the 21st Century.

Google's sole purpose is to provide information. It's easy to see why their projects to digitize entire University libraries, mainstream books, and other print media are contested as being too accessible at no cost (sometimes known as the "Wikipedia syndrome"), but look at who Google's toughest critics are: competitors and others who stand to gain nothing from the project. If Google were still a start-up search engine with a very small user base, would Microsoft and Yahoo throw a fit? Before allowing the Michigan Digitization Project, the University of Michigan filed suit on behalf of an author's guild since the company was seemingly in violation of intellectual property rights. Michigan is now the biggest advocate of digital book scanning, as economist and Michigan librarian Paul Courant led the charge to keep up with Cornell, Stanford and Columbia allowing access to their library collections. He wrote, simply, on his blog, "I believe Michigan and Google are changing the world."

Google only threatens the traditional information infrastructure that was devoid of balanced competition for almost ten years. Now, the rest are playing catch-up to Google's methods. The problem area is, that if Google has no competition at all, it would become too powerful with seemingly infinite ad revenue, and that creates a real vacuum. Google has expressed interest in cataloging everything in the world...but would we as a nation want their satellite data and information on our defense projects available to the tech-savvy web searcher? The existence of other companies keeps Google in check, not the self-restraint of its board. If Google were too powerful, Microsoft would be kaput.

The growth of the company has in a way led to a smarter internet, and collaboration that has produced amazing technological devices and services. Atlantic Monthly in July championed pharmacological research that suggests the ever-increasing amount of information on the web is making humans, as a species, smarter. In regular speak: without Google, our lives are a jumbled mess, and we're unable to maintain our fluid intelligence or think deeply. I would feel stupid and uninformed without Google Reader and Blogger software to occupy my internet-browsing time. And show me a University student anywhere in the country that wouldn't rejoice at being able to pull up a hard-to-find book for a term paper on their personal computer. Google's services are too numerous to effectively contain. Not when what is being dealt with is out there in cyberspace. Sharing news, video and documents is integrated into society, and can't be easily yanked out. Google yielded by allowing the Universities to maintain control of their collections, because of cries by academics over a single entity having too much power to control information.

Google may come uncomfortably close to high levels of government or an organization when it asks to be allowed in, as it did with China last year, or when it wants to abduct an entire archive of information as it did with the University of Michigan's Library. It may act as infallible and impervious to error or going too far (street-level satellite viewing), but Google is a tool of our globalized world. Google tells us what we are searching for, and how society is behaving. Their information helps us live.

There won't be another Google anytime soon, so the one we have has to be allowed to conduct its business how it sees fit, minding certain rules of course. Only when it swallows up Facebook and Twitter will there be true cause for alarm.