Silent, and yet not silent.

Perhaps if you don’t post regularly, wordpress will eventually dump all your work.   That would be an unwelcome occurrence, but who could blame them?  Why would they want to take up space storing  your stuff indefinitely?

It’s been months, and it might be months more. Since there’s no time for a substantive post, I’ll recount my dream from last night.

I was wandering through a hotel by myself, It was mostly deserted. At the end of a hallway there was an open door. The room was a suite.  A huge suite with lots of rooms.  The beds were all made with pale blue and white paisley quilts. One was rumpled, but nobody was in it.

When I walked out of the suite, I encountered its occupant. I apologized for being in the room and I hurried away.

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In case you missed the debate at Ole Miss

Let’s begin with Jim Lehrer, who made the most interesting and unacknowledged verbal gaffe of the evening, when he asked both presidential candidates how the current economic crisis would alter their approach to “ruling” the country.  Ruling the country!

“The way you will rule,” might have been Lehrer’s exact phrase.  The Reasonable Observer was at the home of some friends, and had to ask her host to stop the feed and replay it, just to make sure she’d heard correctly.

Yes, God help us, one of America’s most credible newspersons conferred upon the nation’s top office a new and ultimate level of power, and he didn’t correct himself, and neither did the constitutional law professor correct him, and neither did the war hero who sacrificed on the altar of freedom the utility of his upper body for the remainder of his life.  Stunning.

There were no soul-stirring moments in this debate.  But either candidate could have created one.

“Before I answer Jim, I just want to note that you used the word ‘rule.’  I’m not sure whether that was intentional, but I want to assure the American people that I don’t aspire to be a ruler.  We founded this country in rejection of a ruler. The president works for the American people. I will strive to fulfill our American ideal of elected leadership.”

How electric it might have been. Had it happened. How non-partisan. How unifying, and inspirational, to hear an elected leader distance himself from power.

The focus groups were apparently bored.  The crawling real-time graph at the bottom of the screen had a blue line for Dems, a red line for GOP, and a green line for Indies.  The blue and red lines remained virtually flat, while the Indy line wiggled up and down a bit. But none of the lines ever spiked.  That means nobody of any persuasion ever felt enthusiasm, or even disdain. The fight for the mushy middle can be an unexciting fight.

This is not to say that neither candidate ever looked good. McCain looked very good discussing past foreign interventions. He spoke names and dates and outcomes with the authenticity of a first-hand observer. He was persuasive.

Obama used his lawyering  to defend from McCain’s jabs. The Clintons gave lawyerly conduct a bad name, but this is not an unimportant skill for someone who will have to sit face-to-face with hostile world leaders. Obama is good at it, and it served him well in this debate.

The Reasonable Observer did not enjoy this debate, in which both candidates strained to demonstrate a grasp of economics. By anyone’s account this was the critical topic of the day, and one had to wonder how the two men vying for the most important office in the world could be devoid of meaningful comment on the subject.

It should also be noted that both candidates leaned on the wretchedly over-used Wall Street-Main Street cliché.  Never play the drinking game with this one, or you won’t be able to drive home. Especially in a week like the one we just experienced.

The day I made the voting machine crash. And what I want you to do about it.

“Does this mean what I think it means?”

I blinked and squinted at the Sequoia voting machine. Like all computers, the machine speaks a language of its own.

“Vote save failure,” the machine insisted. Nothing else happened. My vote had crashed the Sequoia.

What are the odds? It was election day of 2006. I was a reporter who’d produced an extensive body of work on touch-screen voting. The machine that’s been the subject of many of my stories had just rejected my vote. I straddled the line between a calm command of the subject, and a mild form of hysteria that’s sent many voters running to the media, claiming to have been – what’s the word they throw around? – disenfranchised.

In the news business, election day is akin to the day after Thanksgiving at Macy’s. It’s one of our busiest days, and time-consuming personal complications are unwelcome. But the next two hours on election day 2006 were spent on a personal mission to ensure, by God, that my ballot would not be a “vote save failure.”

I am in no way an average voter in this context. My coverage of electronic voting security started in 2003, with a single interview of a still-anonymous hacker. It’s expanded over the years to include, for instance, a story that required me to take the same training poll workers take. It culminated last summer in a five-part series after computer scientists at the University of California documented numerous flaws in the same voting machine we use in Nevada. My knowledge of the machines, their function, their liabilities, and of polling place procedure far exceeds that of the average voter. On election day of 2006 I was well prepared to act on my own behalf.

As it turned out, this particular machine had not malfunctioned in any way that was fatal to democracy. There’s a simple procedure that would have allowed the poll workers to check the status of my voter activation card, and quickly resolve whether my vote had been captured. A second vote could have been permitted, had the procedure been followed.

It was the poll manager who malfunctioned in a potentially catastrophic way, not the machine. When it became clear I would make no headway with him, I got in my car and drove to the Washoe County voter registrar’s office, armed with the serial number of the malfunctioning machine, the time stamp from my transaction, and an informed account of what occurred.

Washoe County sent me back to vote again. The registrar’s office phoned ahead to tell the poll workers I was on my way. Nonetheless, my return was a conspicuous event, and the volunteer staff cast wary eyes toward the woman who’d seized their operation manual from them earlier in the day, when they’d declined to share it upon request.

I voted, the machine functioned, and all was well. It should be noted, though, that there were a half dozen junctures at which, had I been an average voter, I might have given up.

Shortly after election day, I was debriefed by a group of county officials. Flush with emotion from the experience, and consumed with a sense of community obligation, I swore before heaven and those officials that for the next election, I would put out a call for a fresh brigade of poll workers drawn from the tech intelligentsia. I would gather them from every corner of the county. I wasn’t sure how, but I would. My recruits would hail from the management and professional ranks, and would not be bullied by a Microsoft Windows error message.

If you fit the above description, prepare to have a guilt heaped upon you. Born in the United States in the latter twentieth century, we are like the heirs from an extraordinarily wealthy family. We have choices that outstrip our capacity to exercise them.

We can spend election Tuesday doing anything we want to do, and most of us spend it making money. We’re perfectly happy to leave the hard work of election volunteering to the generation that’s free on Tuesday, and on every other day, because they’ve finished their careers. They, thankfully, are willing to assume increasingly demanding election-day tasks, rather than play a well-earned game of Tuesday golf.

Elections have changed. They are no longer church-basement affairs. Indeed, terms like “ballot box” and “voting booth” are just quaint expressions now. Proper poll management requires a new level of technical sophistication and astuteness to security. It can’t be instilled in the time available to train volunteer poll workers, nor could any volunteer be reasonably expected to sit through it if it could.

The challenges confronting poll workers are some of the same ones you encounter daily in a tech-driven workplace. The people who know how to handle them – you — are stunningly absent from the election day volunteer force, considering the good fortune our freedom has afforded you.

Washoe County has been actively recruiting from your ranks for election 2008. Only problem is, well-intentioned people sign up, and then fail to materialize on training day.

My investigations into voting security and integrity have repeatedly confirmed that the election-day performance of human beings is equally critical to the performance of the voting machines. In the long term, both components will have to be addressed. For now, we are stuck with the generation of machines we’ve got, and that’s another subject for another day. We can, however, make immediate and continual improvements to human performance. But help is needed.

Volunteering requires one (very long) day at the polls and one half-day for training. In Washoe County, volunteers are paid. The pay doesn’t approach what you earn when you’re on the phone with a client, but one might argue that preserving the integrity of the vote is worth the financial sacrifice for a couple of lousy days every two years.

In November, for the first time in many years, I will not be working for any media organization. I hope to be an election day volunteer for the first time. (Subject to approval of brand new employer.) Meanwhile, please forward this to a half dozen or so of your closest friends. I hope to see you all in the training class.  SS

Sarah Palin: It’s the happiness, stupid.

That “click” you heard last week. It was Sarah Palin clicking with the Republican base. It was a series of clicks, actually, because she clicked outside the base, too, as intended. We’ll soon know how far outside.

But wait – this was supposed to be Hillary’s year as the woman who captured public imagination. The immense fascination with Alaska’s governor is a study in contrast with the uphill and ultimately unsuccessful promotion of Hillary as the answer to an unmet need for female leadership.

What little of Hillary’s flame that still flickered after months of gradual smothering by Obama was finally snuffed out, in the time it takes to say “pit bull with lipstick.”

But why? The Reasonable Observer will not presume to analyze Palin. The elements of public infatuation originate in the public psyche, and that’s where the analysis belongs. There’s some kind of unfulfilled mass desire being projected onto Palin, and she’s reflecting it back.

This is the case with all meteoric and madly adored public figures. Marilyn Monroe, Oprah, Madonna, Diana Princess of Wales, all vessels in which to pour some enormous, collectively-felt need that’s psychological, not political. (The public doesn’t have political needs. Political needs are an invention of politicians.)

The Reasonable Observer believes there’s a great longing in American culture for happy women. We have pronounced ourselves depressed, misunderstood, beset with eating disorders, overwhelmed with responsibility, held back by our good looks, or by lack of good looks, hampered by unfairness in the workplace. Whatever. We are perpetually and insurmountably burdened with one thing or another. Stop at the supermarket checkstand and survey the magazine covers. The headlines belie the smiles on the faces of the models. “How to be happy,” in fact, does appear from time to time as a topic in these glossies.

But even with all the instruction, all the resources available to us, and all the freedom we have to use them, we’re never quite there. Our internal anguish knows no limits.

Most men have been forced into at least some passing acquaintance with the misery box where the American woman spends a great deal of her time. And, the Reasonable Observer believes, most men would like nothing better than for women to be happy.

Enter Sarah Palin, who appears to radiate happiness. She appears to have a great life, with a handsome husband willing to be Mr. Mom while she serves as governor. She has a brood of smiling children and has enjoyed an adventurous, stimulating existence. She is what several generations of American women have claimed they would like to be.

Most significant, Palin appears to have been complete before she became a candidate for national office. Which is to say, she doesn’t need a McCain-Palin victory to complete her.

Unlike Hillary, who by her own account when she broke down and cried in New Hampshire, won’t be complete unless she wins the White House. Who spoke frequently about her struggle, and the unfairness of the female experience. Even the myriad campaign photos that portray Hillary waving to supporters, smiling wide and often bug-eyed with exaggerated enthusiasm, fail to convey any native happiness.

If McCain-Palin loses, Palin will go back to her happy-looking life in Alaska. The crowd senses she’s not struggling to keep her head above the water of female misery. What a relief. We see that it’s possible for American women to live happily ever after.

They should teach us not to wear an orange pantsuit to a public appearance. That would be a useful lesson.

Congressman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) assures the host of The Communicators on C-Span that the nation will not go uninstructed during the transition to high definition television. There is a public education program in progress, so nobody will be caught with their rabbit ears down.

How amusing. We did just fine when we taught ourselves to use the internet, didn’t we? Indeed, the federal government sat on the internet for several decades wondering what to do with it. Only when we — the poor, stupid slobs who need a public education program to help us figure out how to keep our TV reception – it was only when we got our hands on the internet that it began to be truly useful.

Neither did we require an outreach program to learn to use our cell phones, our BlackBerrys, our iPods, our blogging software, or the satellite radios in our cars. We figured it out all by our pathetic little selves.

Yet, as the HD deadline approaches, we hear such federal tongue clucking over our capacity to grasp the switch.

“I’m absolutely confident there are a lot of people out there who don’t understand the implications.” Rep. Goodlatte tells the host of  The Communicators.

(What is that host’s name? As a brief aside, this is what makes C-Span great. On C-Span, the hosts are smart and smooth as you’ll find anywhere, but the information is the star of the show.)

Anyway, the feds will offer us plenty of free advice on enlisting this new TV technology. This is a bit like Rosie O’Donnell offering fashion advice to Paris Hilton.

And now, a word about the women who took the national political stage this week. Michelle Obama gave virtually the same speech she’s been giving from the outset. It’s the same speech she gave 13 months ago in Reno. Not much new, except for some relatively minor clarifications.

Hillary was lauded for a great speech that, in truth, seemed less interesting and less energetic than her “concession” speech, where she made the original reference to the millions of cracks in the glass ceiling. After all the buildup, the convention speech was a disappointment, riddled with political cliché, and lacking punch. And the orange prison jumpsuit. Good God, what was she thinking?

(Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde: “Whoever said orange was the ‘new pink’ was seriously disturbed.”)

The new woman on the scene, Sarah Palin, is a natural. Unlike Michelle, who is smart and vibrant, but scripted, and Hillary, who is anything but a natural public speaker, Palin sounds like she’s using her own words, as they come to her. It may not be the case, but she sounds that way.

This is a gift given to few. Most people sound different at best, and stilted at worst when they speak formally, and especially when they give a speech. Palin’s initial speech with McCain by her side was fluid and graceful, with good rhythm, and substantively better than most of McCain’s speeches.

She may be on the lower rungs of the experience ladder, but putting aside any analysis of her qualifications, this knack for public speaking is likely to pull some people in.

Finally, Reasonable Reporter, having cut loose from the world of news reporting, has decided to adopt the name Reasonable Observer. At least for now. There is plenty to observe, and the same spirit of reasonableness applies. To everything. We shall see.

Pulling the plug on radio

Today, the Reasonable Reporter will pull the plug on her radio career, in favor of a challenging new pursuit that starts in mid-September. The new gig is outside the media. It’s an exciting and long-overdue change. There is nonetheless an emotional tug-of-war in process, as the professional comfort zone is left behind.

The broadcaster’s life has been a source of variety, creative triumphs, close friendships, and spurts of personal growth. (It’s also offered bitter disappointments, personal betrayals, and many dysfunctional relationships. How could two decades worth of anything be otherwise?)

Mostly, though, it’s a field that rewards big thinking and teaches adaptability. The lessons learned will continue to serve.

The Reasonable Reporter has spent recent weeks contemplating the ways in which today’s radio business resembles today’s housing market. Broadcasting speculators binged in the 90s, buying up far more property than they could reasonably expect to maintain. The binge drove the up the price of a radio signal, especially a signal in a nice neighborhood. (Was it 16-times earnings? The Reasonable Reporter can’t remember the multiple, but she remembers it seemed a bit like paying three-quarters of a million for a 2,000 square-foot ranch house with a shopping center across the street.)

Then the value began to drop, as listeners discovered new media alternatives. Many owners are left with property that’s producing less – maybe a lot less. Unlike a house, which would collapse if you began to pull out its support beams, broadcasters were able for some time to disguise the diminishing value by dismantling the product, beam by beam.

The product is cheaper to produce, but weaker now as a result. Not that there weren’t inefficiencies to tweak. There were. But here’s what’s magical about working in radio. There’s just a degree or two of separation between the radio listener in his car, and the back-office operation of the station. In most broadcast operations, every employee is very close to the end product, and that’s historic, not recent.

This is a business where every person serves a mission-critical function. Every person’s performance reflects on the product, negatively or positively – and audibly, by the way, even if that person never goes near a microphone.

This is why we once leaned so hard on a particular phrase that it became an industry cliché. “It’s a people business,” we used to say.

In those days, everyone with any longevity was retained on the basis of energy, commitment and authentic contribution. Creative entrepreneurs thrived. But the tools of entrepreneurship have been largely stripped away, and the people who applied them have gone elsewhere. It’s still a people business, but it’s been a long time since anyone has actually said so.

As the Reasonable Reporter leaves the business, she mourns its entry into its lowest period since she entered it. At the same time, she is determined not to sound like the cranky and embittered talent who spent the mergers-and-acquisitions decade in chat rooms devoted exclusively to their invective and their lamentations for the lost good old days.

Radio is resilient. The industry will reinvent itself, as it has done twice previously. Once, when television eclipsed it as the dominant venue for home entertainment. Once again, when FM killed AM for the delivery of music.

It will reinvent itself, but it had better hurry. The reinvention has so far been leisurely and uninspiring. It is stalled in phase one nearly a decade after we began to discover that teens no longer consider radio to be a cultural imperative.

The older demographics were a safe harbor for a time, but that time is almost up, and we’re still undertaking our reinvention as if the mountain will come to us. We’ve stubbornly applied our long-cherished old formula to new media, as if that should be enough. It works in a limited fashion. But it’s not enough to save us.

For her many friends in the business, and for the hard-working talent who continue to bat home runs in a creaky old stadium, the Reasonable Reporter hopes to see the industry adopt greater urgency in the matter of its reinvention.

Meanwhile, this space will soon be devoted to discussions of a particular subset of law. (As an avocation, unrelated to the new gig.) The name will need to change, since “Reasonable Reporter” will be only half accurate after today. More details to come.

McCain leaves everything on the table in Sparks.

In an odd exchange following John McCain’s town hall meeting in Sparks this week, the candidate deflected a question from the Reasonable Reporter by suggesting that she might be a conservative. There would be no justification for telling the story, and it would remain untold, except that Anjeanette Damon alluded to the moment both in her Reno Gazette Journal report, and in her blog.  Damon’s account was picked up by another blogger who shortened it. The effect of his edit was to leave the impression that McCain’s words were directed at her.

OK, it’s not exactly accurate to say McCain deflected the question. He didn’t allow the question. He cut it off cold after a few words, and talked over the ensuing attempt to follow up.

McCain was moving away from an uncomfortable subject – that core conservatives still find him unsettling as the Republican nominee for the White House. He’d brought this particular episode on himself, by articulating two days earlier sentiments identical to Barack Obama’s on what it would take to save social security. >

It’s now been well chewed over in the media that McCain made conservatives nervous about the possibility of a payroll tax hike by telling George Stephanopoulos “everything should be on the table” with regard to social security, and by invoking the 1983 Tip O’Neill-Ronald Reagan bipartisan solution for same.

In Sparks, it was RGJ reporter Damon who opened the social security door when the candidate told local reporters that a recession is a bad time to raise taxes, and he won’t do it.

“Even payroll taxes for social security?”  Damon asked.

When Damon tried to pin him down, McCain asserted several times that he would not raise taxes, and also repeated several times that for the purpose of negotiating a social security solution, “everything should be on the table. “

The Reasonable Reporter said to McCain that he sounded as though he was addressing two separate things. Meaning, as if it needs to be spelled out, that leaving everything on the table during a social security discussion raises the possibility of a tax increase, and it is, in effect, all one subject.  The subject is taxes.  Damon got it, McCain didn’t.

McCain repeated. No new taxes, and everything on the table.

The Reasonable Reporter then suggested – or began to suggest – that McCain’s persistence in promoting an “everything on the table” approach while simultaneously promising “no new taxes” is an example of what makes conservatives skeptical of him.

The presumptive nominee might have been more tolerant in a one-on-one interview, having been alerted that the reporter represents a medium with a largely conservative audience.  He might have treated the topic as respectfully during the interview as he did during the town hall, when a Douglas County man took the microphone and said that he’s unenthusiastic about McCain, and needs reassurance that the candidate will carry out the conservative values of Douglas County voters.

In a one-on-one conversation, McCain might have started with the same answer he gave to Douglas County. (Burning up 5 minutes and 34 seconds of the ten minutes that would surely have been our time limit.)  Or the Reasonable Reporter might have respectfully interrupted after a minute or so, to ponder with the senator a matter that may be keeping Nevada’s down-ballot Republicans awake at night.

Can Republicans running for state and local office count on McCain to deliver conservative voters to the polls?  In their fight to retain a one-seat majority in the state senate, and a teetering hedge against a two-thirds Democratic assembly, what can McCain do to help Nevada candidates?  In an environment where the sitting Republican governor’s coattails have been clipped, can state and local Republican candidates look to McCain’s coattails?  Or are his coattails also too short to ride?

In the Reed High School gym, McCain had declared himself to be the underdog. He told the audience he needs them to bring it home for him.

In the press room, he was unwilling to indulge this discussion. McCain rolled over the Reasonable Reporter like a freight train. He’s never voted for a tax increase he said; he’s always supported tax cuts. He’s never had any conservative express fear to him that he will raise taxes; he is unaware of any conservative who doubts him on taxes.

Unless you, McCain said to the Reasonable Reporter, might be “one of that conservative group. “

Leaving the Reasonable Reporter to wonder aloud as she and her colleagues packed up to leave, why, from McCain’s perspective, that was such an effective put-down.

Presidential candidates should be protecting the personal information of reporters.

The Reasonable Reporter is good and steamed.  She has lost track of the times since Nevada became a swing state in 2004 that she’s been asked to send personal identifying information via unsecured means to the Secret Service for a background check. To protect elected officials, the federal government asks reporters to compromise their own security.

Hey presidential candidates… want to seem savvy?  Develop a data security policy for dealing with personal background check information, and insist that the feds use it. Start protecting the personal information of reporters.

Then send out press releases patting yourselves on the back for it.

It is way past time for the government to get hip about cybercrime, and stop exposing citizens to identity theft.  Not just the feds.  All the way up and down the ladder from municipal utility districts to the White House, the attitude about the personal data of citizens is outrageously cavalier.  In many cases, personal identifiers are collected unnecessarily for the task at hand.

When big batches of identifiers are lost, stolen or misplaced, the announcement is always the same.  “We have no evidence that any ID theft has occurred.”  Of course!  You will never have such evidence until it’s too late.

In congress they’ve produced useless cybercrime bills for more than a decade, while failing to do basic things that would offer some measure of real citizen protection.  Name the category. Identity theft, hacking, spam, porn.  The laws are big, ugly, smelly, expensive dogs with just enough teeth to bite the mail man.

The federal anti-hacking law, for example, is currently being misused to prosecute a woman who’s accused of inducing a teen-aged girl to commit suicide by posting gossip about her on MySpace.  This law was intended to prevent unauthorized persons from taking control of computer systems that don’t belong to them, not to grandstand in a grief-stricken community when a murder charge is unavailable to prosecutors.

The Child Online Protection Act was struck down last week by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, having been challenged on first amendment grounds the morning after it passed in 1998.  (The original name of the case was ACLU v. Reno.  That’s Janet Reno.)

COPA never went in to effect because even a first-year law student with a D average could see that it was unconstitutional on is face.  It didn’t require dozens of lawyers and a decade of legal review to recognize its obvious legal and practical flaws.

Can-Spam Act?  Let’s see. The Reasonable Reporter recently went on a wild goose chase from one alphabet soup agency to another, trying to get comments about an ID theft scheme targeted at one specific regulated industry.  She finally got a bit feisty when she was passed off yet again to someone else, and nobody would talk on the record, and she was finally told that – well – we don’t talk about it because we really can’t do anything about it.

Yes you can, you twits!  Start enforcing the part of the Social Security Act that says our social security identification numbers are to be used only to manage our government retirement accounts.

Presidential candidates: One of you will win, and the other will go back to the senate. Please, make it so.

By the way, it’s been said that Nevada is at the top of every bad list. Not so.  On October 1, NRS 597.97 will prohibit businesses from sending personal identifiers such as social security numbers and dates of birth by email without encryption. Thank you, Nevada legislature.

UPDATE:  The Reasonable Reporter was offered a fax number by the United States Secret Service. Thank you, Secret Service.

Nevada voters do not have the luxury of being dumb.

Are the voters in Nevada a bunch of dummies?

The question was posed before the Supreme Court this week by Las Vegas attorney Dominic Gentile. He argued that the term limits question was not complex, and the voters understood quite well the initiative’s potential effect, regardless of technicalities now raised by the legislature, which wants term limits tossed.

Are voters in Nevada a bunch of dummies? The question lingers, extending beyond term limits or any other single issue, inviting contemplation of complex issues and uninformed citizens. Of government mechanisms so intricate they can’t be understood without hours of study. Of what voters want, versus what they get, and what they end up creating.

The term limits case serves nicely as an example of how simple concepts become complicated. The must-pass-twice requirement for constitutional amendments, intended to ensure deliberation, leaves a two-year hole for legal maneuvers that add layers of complication. The current challenge to term limits has its roots in a confusing bout of court activity that occurred between its first ballot victory and its second, two years later.

For a future source confusion, look at PISTOL, the oddly-named eminent domain initiative from 2006 that seemed conceptually straightforward. Nevada voters overwhelmingly approved it once, understanding well their own outrage at the notion that one citizen could benefit by enlisting the government to take property from another citizen.

Then the 2007 legislature set out to improve PISTOL before its 2008 appearance on the ballot. The PISTOL improvements exist now in statute. But wait, that’s not all. The legislature also passed a resolution – call it PISTOL Version 2 — to amend the constitution again. Version 2 will need a second legislative approval in 2009. Meanwhile PISTOL Version 1 could pass again in 2008.

Leaving aside whether PISTOL Version 1 needed improving – many believe it did – the whole mess has become stunningly complex.

Are Nevada’s voters a bunch of dummies? Or does the preceding make your head spin? Who could expect the average voter, busy with life’s daily details – jobs, kids, homework, volunteer work, etc – to untangle the mess that lurks beneath the straightforward question?

How about taxes? A recent example of tax complexity appeared on the 2006 ballot. AB 554 from the 2005 legislative session required voter approval to perform some taxation housekeeping. Did even half of the voters understand what this bewildering item was, much less why they were voting on it?

Look beyond the ballot, at Dillon’s rule. Not at whether home rule is desirable, but at whether its absence makes things confusing. Busy voters have to follow the progress of local issues from city hall to Carson City and back. Are the voters dummies if the reason for the trip isn’t immediately apparent?

And now, in Washoe County, here comes the mother of all complex issues. A recent proposal by investment firm Goldman Sachs to lease Truckee Meadows Water Authority assets is about to be vetted in public. Politicians find the possibility intriguing. The TMWA board, comprised of five politicians and two political appointees, voted 6-1 to explore it. The public seems to hate the idea, with generalized fear of privatization as the most-cited reason for knee-jerk aversion

There is layer-upon-layer of complexity to be peeled back in the proposed TMWA transaction. Analysis related to pricing, to employee compensation, to local control, to the structure of the entity. And there’s the ever-present, but never-discussed effect of monopoly.

TMWA was statutorily exempted from PUC oversight when the non-profit utility was created. Theoretically, if the voters don’t like the direction, they can take vengeance on the elected officials who sit on the board. We’ll see whether that’s well understood by the voters or the office holders. But as usual, whatever the outcome, Nevada voters don’t have the luxury of being dumb.

Rush Limbaugh, big money, and Marconi’s old medium

Traditional media, recently declared dead, or at least critically ill in the face of new media’s rising commercial viability, has a pulse after all. Rush Limbaugh’s new contract is a 400 million dollar expression of confidence in traditional media, and such expressions of confidence have been rare in recent years.

But news of Rush Limbaugh’s record-breaking contract has been discussed less in terms of its business significance, which is enormous in the context of a shrinking pie for old media outlets, and more in terms of whether he, or anyone else, should earn so much money. Even a local conservative talk show host in the Limbaugh mode – which reveres capitalism and personal achievement — asked, “how much is enough?”

The Reasonable Reporter must disclose that she is part of the Limbaugh trickle-down economy, having been paid in Limbaugh dollars for at least half of what is becoming a lengthy radio career. It’s often said, and it’s not hyperbole, that Rush Limbaugh saved AM radio. For those in the newstalk arena, it’s not in dispute, and the dollars, if not the politics have flowed to all the personnel of the stations that carry the show, whether or not they appreciate the association. (Many do not appreciate it, and some are even embarrassed by it.)

This is not to say we’d all be flipping burgers if not for Rush. But lots of people have the jobs we have because of who and what he is, and because of what he fashioned from a product that was gasping for air in 1988, in the face of competition from… hmmm… a new medium that had at last realized its commercial viability. FM radio had matured, and after some years as a novelty, had become a mainstream medium, draining the ad dollars away from the AMs. Superior-sounding FM was the new preferred venue for music, effectively placing a pillow over the faces of the top-40 AM powerhouses that had driven the industry for more than two decades. AM radio had to be reinvented as a talk-intensive product.

It’s worth noting that AM radio had already reinvented itself once, becoming almost entirely music-focused – the iPod of its day for a youth market seeking cultural identity — after television stole radio’s place in the family’s living room, replacing it as the preferred venue for drama and comedy.

It may also be important to note that Rush himself often refers to the AM talk product, or at least his portion of it, as if it were not part of the traditional media. And while he’s probably correct from a content perspective, the delivery device is strictly old media.

That brings us to content, which is still king. Rush is discussed primarily in terms of his political persona. His success is partially attributed to his early years as a disc jockey, which gave him added dimension as an entertainer rather than just an analyst of current events. Both are important components of the man who is now a 400-million dollar phenomenon. But neither fully explains his success.

Rush Limbaugh’s success is built on instinct, and the Reasonable Reporter asserts that the conservative content initially mattered mostly because the time was right for it. As heartfelt as his politics might be, everything about the Rush Limbaugh empire points to his instinct for the right move at the right moment, and for pressing the advantage when he’s gotten it.

The instinct plays itself out in his daily execution of the material, irrespective of the politics. He could be discussing cake recipes, and he would still have to locate the bull’s eye, topically speaking.

The instinct is larger, though, than what he says and how he says it. The instinct is manifest in his syndication model, and in the many ways he’s extended the product, including the early embrace of newsletters and podcasting. The instinct is manifest not just in the what, but the when and how, and how much.

But listen to the public discussion, from callers to the lofty desk of C-Span’s “Washington Journal” to the local talk radio station.

Adoration: He’s wonderful and he deserves the money. Excoriation: He’s a horrible hate monger who’s divided the country and it’s appalling that he’s rewarded in this way. We love him. We hate him. But by and large, we fail to explain what he really is.

Traditional media is shrinking at an alarming rate as the new media mature. The layoffs and contract buyouts are in progress. The newspaper is tiny. It has no heft as it hits the porch. Network television relies almost entirely on low-budget mindlessness. The iPod is the new radio. Minus the people who produce radio.

And yet, as the audience fragments, and the advertising money scatters in new directions, AM radio fares generally better than its battered counterparts, and a 400 million-dollar gesture of confidence has been made. It’s confidence in Marconi’s old medium, but only indirectly.