I need a paper newspaper in order to be happy eating breakfast. Take that as a given in this problem. I've been getting the New York Times, and aside from a few glitches delivery is very consistent, but pricey at $50/month. But I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the discrepency between the qualities that we all want to see in our "paper of record" and the reality (assorted scandals, cowardly political stance, lack of transparency; the fact that, in any article in which I know any details independently, the Times is often meaningfully incomplete or wrong). The naked elephant is that we are forced by our need to have a "paper of record" to pretend that these problems don't exist.

So I impulsively canceled the Times recently, prompted immediately by disgust over their unexplained one-year delay in printing the NSA spying store, but foundationally by my desire to try other papers.

The Washington Post has had a better record politically— you can read that as matching my personal biases, or as refusing to submit to political pressure and reporting important news as needed on a news bases— but I can't get it on paper here in San Diego. I am doing a free trial of the electronic edition, which is access to a PDF-style image of each page, but it's not satisfactory. Even the biggest size is uncomfortably small, it's slow, and the email announcing it's available usually comes after noon.

The San Diego Union Tribune is a lower-quality regional paper. It runs a lot of wire stories, has shoddy local reporting, a history of incompetent family management, and a strong pro-military, jingoistic bias. It's not an option.

The last option would seem to be the LA Times. But they recently fired Michael Kinsley, who despite a tendency to silliness had a correctly placed heart. To wit, his failed Wiki experiment at least demonstrated his understanding that, in the world of the internet, newspapers will have a role closer to that of trusted arbiter than to news-gatherer. The new guy is a cipher, and they fired a number of long-term quality Op-Ed columnists and brought in some jokers. The A section is usually 30+ pages long, but most of those pages have either one-eight-page bit of editorial content or a full-page ad. Seriously. That's not an exaggeration.

The LA Weekly frequently has better local and statewide journalism than the LA Times, and always has better cultural material, and used to have my favorite movie critic (Mahnola Dargis, who jumped to the LA Times and then to the NY Times, where she is now), but is a weekly, not a daily. The SD Reader is usually two to three pages of halfway readable editorial content and then a few semi-literate features and columnists, reprints, and hundreds of ads for plastic surgery. The only thing I like about it is the reviews of churches, complete with four-star system and breakdown of sermon, liturgy, snacks, architecture, etc.

So I'm stuck. Probably I'll just go crawling back to the NY Times for my dead tree fix, but I won't like it.

Today's good news:

The Senate blocked an attempt to open an Alaska wildlife refuge to oil drilling Wednesday, foiling an attempt by drilling backers to force the measure through Congress as part of a must-have defense spending bill. It was a stinging defeat for Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska ...—AP Wire

Today's good news:

Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District is a major victory for science and a major blow to those who have tried to sneak religion into the classroom by disguising in scientific garb. But it’s more than that. It is a brilliant, insightful, profound decision that reaches to the bottom of ID and finds it empty.—Timothy Sandefur

Today's good news:

The Senate on Friday rejected attempts to reauthorize several provisions of the USA Patriot Act as infringing too much on Americans' privacy, dealing a major defeat to President Bush and Republican leaders.

In a crucial vote Friday morning as Congress raced toward adjournment, the bill's Senate supporters were not able to garner the 60 votes necessary to overcome a threatened filibuster by Sens. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and their allies. The final vote was 52-47.—Associated Press

The joy in these recent small steps away from torture, gulags, and police state powers is tempered, by the horror that our government has been engaging in these very un-American activities in our name, by the fact that so many officials make parody-proof statements like:

The failure to renew the provisions would be "interpreted by our enemies as somehow inviting or even enabling further terrorist attacks on U.S. soil," Sen. Orrin Hatch (news, bio, voting record), R-Utah, said. ... "In the war on terror, we cannot afford to be without these vital tools for a single moment," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said earlier today before the Senate vote.

In the future I'll try to highlight good news that doesn't have such a dark side.

Today's good news:

The Senate is poised to approve a measure that would require the Bush administration to provide Congress with its most specific and extensive accounting about the secret prison system established by the Central Intelligence Agency to house terrorism suspects. —NY Times

In an uncharacteristic burst of non-stupidity, the Department of Homeland Security wants to allow small blades back on airplanes. Naturally, this causes consternation among people who don't understand what security means:

"It's not about scissors, it's about bombs," Mr. Hawley testified. "Sorting through thousands of bags a day at two or three minutes apiece to sort out small scissors and tools does not help security. It hurts it."

Weighing the risk of small scissors and tools against that of bombs, he said, "If you do the analysis, it is not even close."

But the committee chairman, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, said he found that logic "difficult to follow." Mr. Stevens proposed instead that the security agency reduce the number of bags that passengers may carry on board to one from two, giving the screeners fewer items to handle.

You will note two problems with Stevens' response. One is that he finds fairly rudimentary logic—should airplane security spend limited resources on bombs or on scissors?—hard to follow. The second is a more subtle but very common mistake. For a resource to be secure, not only must unauthorized not be able to access it, but authorized people must be able to access it. If it's "secure" even from the person who's supposed to use it, it's not really secure. Denial of service is a security attack. Self-inflicted denial of service is probably the biggest security attack in the world: think about the times you've lost your keys or forgotten your passwords. Stevens' solution allows screeners to check for both scissors and bombs (one of those two checks is worthless), but prevents passengers from having two carryons. Carry-ons are part of the service; fewer carry-ons amounts to a denial of service. Thanks, Ted. Though I guess in his world we are all driving across his bridges rather than flying in planes.

The only other senator at the hearing, Daniel K. Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii, said; "I could understand if some man or woman would want to bring on a knitting needle. I've seen a lot of ladies knitting. But I've yet to see someone cut paper dolls on the plane."

Perhaps Inouye stays in a private curtained booth, and is unfamiliar with the Swiss Army knife and Leatherman. And he probably hasn't seen this.

In other, similarly themed news:

[San Jose] officials said Thursday they were shocked to learn that Emerald Hills Golfland, a three-acre theme park with two miniature golf courses, had been placed on a Homeland Security watch list.

"The moment we realized it was on the list, it was taken off," said San Jose police officer Rubens Dalaison, who handles "critical infrastructure assessment" for the department. "I myself took it off."

But the list remains secret, and even San Jose Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, who is the ranking minority member of a House subcommittee on terrorism risk assessment, said she did not know whether it is still listed. —Associated Press

Lothar Matthaus has denied an Italian television report that he manipulated balls during Friday's World Cup draw. ... The television channel claimed prepared hot and cold balls allowed Matthaus to know who he was picking.