My friend Tony Seton, a long-time ABC News producer who is practically unique in my circle of friends and acquaintances in his stubborn refusal to toe any particular party or philosophical line, yesterday talked about media responsibility in covering the news. Briefly, Tony's daily podcast "SetonnoteS", took the national media to task for their focus last week on the deaths of Farah Fawcett, Ed McMahon and Michael Jackson when there was other, clearly more vital news to report.

This is a perennial battle. Tony says, citing an L.A. Times essay by Timothy Rutten, that "the editors and publishers are feeding the uninformed masses what they want, not what they need." While that point seems valid on its face, it presumes that there is someone, somewhere who can determine with certainty and impose on the masses his or its own definition of what the people need. It smacks of elitism, something I know Tony doesn't endorse wholeheartedly but in which I suspect he has a secret confidence.

Stories like the revolution in Iran, the major uptick in Iraq bombings as the date for U.S. withdrawal draws near, a Supreme Court ruling that favored privacy rights over government interest, and the legislative morass that is the U.S. Congress should, in Tony's view, have been given higher play and more treatment than the human-interest stories surrounding the lives of celebrities of a nearly bygone era.

I'm inclined to agree, but I always hesitate at the brink of a blanket statement on that subject. It seems to me the topic is a bit more nuanced than Tony's brief essay had time to discuss. For example, I have some perfectly intelligent friends who choose deliberately not to be too well-informed on topics such as war and poverty and crime because they'd rather stay focused on positive news and thoughts. In their belief system, such focus stands a better chance of helping to fix the problems of which they remain essentially uninformed than does focusing on them and fretting over them or even attacking them or declaring war on them. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to that view, either.

Another argument against Tony's well-reasoned position revolves around the media's need to make money. Back in the days when I was a daily newspaper reporter-editor, I recall a conversation with a grizzled old veteran boss in which I complained about his decision to kill an unflattering story I'd done on a city councilman who was also one of the paper's biggest advertisers. "What about the right of free expression?" I demanded in my youthful passion for journalism. He put his pencil on his desk, removed his half-glasses, looked at me slowly and said, "Son, you'll learn in time that the first right of a free press is the right to remain solvent." I didn't agree with him and I still don't, but the viewpoint certainly has some credence, particularly at a time when print media in particular are disappearing down the drain of fiscal instability.

At the end of the day, though, I'd prefer to live in a society where media professionals (by which I decidedly do not mean the likes of either Rush Limbaugh or Keith Olbermann, who are single-minded commentators rather than journalists) make reasoned and objective judgments about what I really need to know than one in which all journalism outlets are entertainment sources far more interested in audience share than in educating the public. The marketplace of ideas suffers when all the ideas are mundane.

My wife told a few people about my special chili, which I've been making for the family for years. We shared it at a church potluck recently and several people asked for the recipe. To make it easier I'm posting it here so she can just send people here to find it.

4 lbs ground meat, or protein substitute
2 medium onions
1 large green pepper
2 medium stalks of celery
3 cans kidney beans
1 can of black beans
4 cans of chopped stewed tomatoes
2 cans of tomato paste
4 cloves of garlic
3 Tbs. chili powder
4 TBS salt
2 bay leaves

Chop onions, green pepper, celery, & mince garlic.
Brown vegetables, brown meat
Dump in the rest of the stuff and mix it all together
Cover and simmer for 1 to 2 1/2 hours.

KarmaTube posted a heart-wrenching music video this morning featuring Michael Jackson's 1988 hit, "Man in the Mirror." I don't believe it would have been possible to assemble this piece this well and get it online in the hours since Jackson's death yesterday, so it seems to me a "cosmic coincidence."

Even if it was planned, though, it is still awesome.

A standard definition of the word "democracy" is, "Democracy is a form of government in which the right to govern is vested in the citizens of a country or a state and exercised through a majority rule." (That particular definition is from Wikipedia but it jibes with 90% of all the definitions I've found.)

So riddle me this: In a state where members of the state legislature are divided on the order of 2:1 along party lines, how does the minority manage, without any assistance from dissenting members of the majority party, to block legislation that a majority of all legislators favor?

The answer is easy: they get a large enough number (simple majority) of the voters to believe in a fear-mongered campaign and require a 2/3 super-majority to pass any budget-related legislation. The result is that the minority -- despite being outnumbered by as much as 2:1 -- can strangle the budgeting process in its crib regardless of the clearly expressed views of the majority of the citizens in a state.

Such is the state of California legislative politics. And it's time it was stopped. With the Republican party both in the state and nationally being increasingly the private turf of the right-wing nuts, espousing an agenda so extreme that the portion of the population that now identifies itself as Republican is hovering just above the teens, we are effectively allowing right-wing extremists to hold the state hostage. The State Controller has announced he'll start issuing state IOUs rather than checks next week if the legislature doesn't act. We are, in a word, on the verge of bankruptcy.

The Democrats have come up with a plan that is only somewhat less Draconian than the one proposed by the GOP but the Republicans refuse to budge. They don't care about what happens to the state. They haven't for many years. They are rich people backed by other rich people whose vested interest is in keeping taxes (that they never pay anyway thanks to loopholes) low. As usual, the GOP would impose the greatest burden of a budget on those who can't afford it and would never vote Republican in the first place: the poor and the middle class.

Now I can understand the Republican Party's lack of interest in reforming this situation; it's their only source of power any more now that they've been captured by the tiny minority who can fit in the outhouse-sized GOP tent. But I think there is an opportunity for sane compromise here and I think the people of California would approve of this idea, or some variation on it.

We should place an initiative on the ballot that would modify the horrific 2/3 supermajority rule so that in any budget year in which a fiscal crisis is declared, the budget could be adopted by a simple majority of the legislature.

Who decides when we're in fiscal crisis? A politically independent body charged only with making that decision, one with no ongoing staff or standing, one made up of independent experts or former/retired lawmakers or judges with no current political axe to grind. Or maybe it doesn't need to be even that complicated; we could have some objective indicators that would auto-trigger the crisis declaration. For example, if the State Controller attempts to borrow money to meet budget demands and is unable to do so because the capital markets don't trust our economic stability (as is now the case), that may be sufficient. Maybe there need to be other criteria factored in. The point is to keep partisan politics out of the process.

I can't see a serious flaw in this design and as I said, I think it's one that the voters would approve in a heart-beat, particularly given the logjams we've had in the state legislature ever since the 2/3 supermajority rule was imposed by a well-meaning but misled electorate.

Hey, it couldn't make things any worse than they are.

I've been using Google's wonderful gMail program now for quite some time. One of the many features I love about it is its ability to all but completely eliminate spam. If I see a half-dozen spam emails in a week, I'm surprised at the high volume. Yeah, I know: spoiled.

But it appears to me that the gMail dam has sprung a leak. In the past week I've received something on the order of 25 spams. It is particularly troubling that these spams are of the "old" style: They contain several random words or they are some of the tried-and-apparently-working things like the Nigerian scam. I am faithfully reporting these as spam but I hope that this is a passing problem and not an indication that the no-good, rotten criminals who are spammers have figured out how to get around gMail's heretofore excellent screening processes.

I've been thinking about writing three smartphone applications lately. Not being an Objective-C developer and being interested in publishing for more than the iPhone platform, I had about settled on using the PhoneGap platform. It would let me leverage my considerable JavaScript, HTML and CSS skills to deploy apps on several smartphones.

When I mentioned this to my old friend Danny Goodman, he suggested I might want to reconsider. He was aware that there had been some controversy over Apple rejecting PhoneGap-based iPhone apps submitted to its store.

I did a bit of research and confirmed at least the strong likelihood that if I chose PhoneGap for my development platform, I'd see my app get rejected by the zealous screeners at Apple. It's not at all clear to anyone outside Apple why they are nixing such apps but their email rejection slips include mention that PhoneGap violates terms of the iPhone license by using third-party APIs. Actually, it doesn't seem to be true, but Apple has met a rising wall of questions, requests for clarification, complaints and public yowling with absolute silence. So we don't know why they're doing this or if indeed the rejections are part of a policy or semi-random decisions by different screeners.

Needless to say, I won't be designing any smartphone apps until I get clear on this issue. While I don't want to develop apps solely for the iPhone, I also don't want to be cut out of the largest smartphone app market segment by being stubborn about my tool choice.

If you can shed any light, please do so.

The scroll wheel on my Apple Mighty Mouse stopped working last night. Vertical scroll worked in only one directino, regardless of which direction I spun the wheel. I changed batteries, restarted the machine, took the mouse offline and brought it back, all to no avail.

I was getting ready to go buy a new one when I thought to search Google. Very near the top of the search results was a link to a YouTube video. Even though the video is in Italian, it demonstrates how to fix this problem. Thirty seconds after watching the video, my mouse was back functioning normally.

Some days the Web continues to amaze.

I'm wondering if anyone knows of a tool that would let me do this crazy thing I have been thinking about this morning.

When I post a new entry to my blog, I'd like a link to that entry to show up in Facebook (I think that already works, but I'm not sure), Twitter, and perhaps in other places I'm not thinking about.

I checked out Meebo, but it looks like it's really about IMing across platforms rather than blog posting. I checked out FriendFeed briefly and it shows some promise but so far it doesn't look like it does everything either.

Thoughts? If you don't want to join my blog to post here, you can email me: dan at danshafer dot com.

I just posted a blog entry about a spiritual healer and a book idea that I'd like your thoughts about if you're interested in the subject. The post is on my spiritual blog on Gaia.com.

Tonight I had about eight emails from new "followers" on Twitter. I was surprised; I haven't done anything to promote my Twitter presence. But I dutifully looked into each of these new "fans" to see if I'd want to follow them as well.

Almost all of them were obviously artificially generated identities. They consisted of a series of one-line posts (a few words each) that showed definite patterns. "I like Keith because she's beautiful." "I don't like Jenny because she's difficult." "I bought some Pepsi." "I ate some fish."

Clearly Twitter has spawned its own brand of spam. It's probably already being called Twam or something equally ridiculous.

I don't think Twitter -- without major changes -- will be nearly as big in a year as it is today. It is getting trite, boring and repetitive and when the scripting knowledgeable folks can get in and make these new identities and threads so easily, the spam factor is going to be humongous.

There's just no there there.