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Here are some scary monsters ...

Is there a pool in your work place on who will win the presidential election? (According to the Fifth Amendment, you may feel free to treat this question as rhetorical.)

Well, if so, your work place isn't the only one. It would appear that the Supreme Court has one as well. Recall that The Washington Post reported that Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor became upset and shouted "This is terrible!" at an Election Night party in 2000 when CBS called Florida for then-Vice President Gore. Democrats have presumed her outburst stemmed from her support for George W. Bush. But this paper suggests that she actually might have been upset about losing a dollar.

I wonder how many other historical events have been misinterpreted because historians didn't know there was an office pool at stake.

Wait. No, I don't.

Here in North Carolina, the polls will be closing in a few minutes after what everyone you ask is calling record voter turnout. I am skeptical, both by nature and because no one I've heard say this has actually gone back and looked at reports from presidential election days past. I recall an earlier election here -- '88 or '92, I forget which -- in which long lines made everyone say the same thing. Of course, we came to find out that turnout as a percentage of registered voters was pretty much at the historical average. We just had a lot more registered voters, and the number of voting machines hadn't kept pace. Hence the lines.

Still, I'm heartened by the reports, as well as by the fact that for all the blather about who did or didn't do what back in 1971, people seem to have been engaged on the issues during this campaign in a way they really haven't been since at least 1992 and possibly since 1980. I know we news types are supposed to be cynical and all, but you know what? That really does my heart good.

After the Constitutional Convention adjourned, someone shouted at Benjamin Franklin, asking what kind of government the delegates had created. Franklin famously replied, "A republic, if you can keep it." He knew what we had, and how much work keeping it would take. Today, and during this whole campaign, it looks like large numbers of us have done the hard work necessary to keep it. Regardless of the outcome, that's good news for the whole country.

Wow. I am now a Major League Blogger, folks: I got my first press kit today addressed to "Mr. Lex Alexander, Blog Writer, News & Record Interactive." It's from the Famous Idaho Potatoes(tm) people and includes a color photo of Denise Austin, "America's leading fitness guru," who looks sort of like a slightly weathered Heather Locklear.

I'm not sure exactly what kind of cuisine-trend-generating power the Famous Idaho Potatoes(tm) people think I wield, but I guess this would be the wrong time to mention that I'm pondering one of those low-starch diets, huh?

Today is the 15th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It's also the 66th anniversary of Kristallnacht.

In case you're ever tempted to look on journalism as a glamorous profession, keep in mind that no one can guarantee that you won't ever spend 15 minutes in a department-wide meeting arguing about the suitability for publication of a single 2-letter word.

Crack cocaine was introduced to this area almost 20 years ago. A lot of very bad things began happening very quickly as a result, and they're all still going on today.

On Sunday, the News & Record begins publishing a three-day series, "Crack in our Community: Too High a Cost," reported and written by my colleague Stan Swofford. The series examines just how far-reaching the effects of crack cocaine use are, the human and financial costs, and ways we just might be able to make headway against it. It also will offer you an online forum in which to discuss the problem and possible solutions. Don't miss it.

Score another one for bloggers: Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Federal Communications Commission and discovered that the record $1.2 million indecency fine levied by the agency against Fox TV for an episode of "Married by America" resulted from a grand total of three original complaints.

Three. That's not a typo.

I had more to say about that in my personal blog, but for the purposes of this blog, let me echo something else Jeff says:

You, too, can report on government through Freedom of Information Act requests. It is incredibly easy. And it is your right.

All I did was go to this FOIA page on the FCC's site and fill out a basic form. And look what came back to me: A story reporters didn't bother getting when they wrote about this FCC action.

[He inserts an image of the letter he received.]

If an agency has to copy more than a certain number of pages (100 in this case) or spend more than a certain number of hours on a request (two here), they will charge you. But you have the opportunity to say how much you're willing to pay when you file the request. [Addendum from Lex: You can ask the agency to waive the fees when you believe dissemination of the information you request will "primarily benefit the public"; such requests typically are granted.]

You can go to any government agency and to local government as well and file such requests. You want to know about your mayor's expense account? You want to see how other agencies use your tax dollars? File an FOIA request.

The Freedom of Information Act isn't meant for reporters. It's meant for citizens ... and now citizen journalists. So use it.

I agree with Jeff, but let me add a couple of caveats.

First, the Freedom of Information Act applies only to federal records, and only executive-branch records at that. (It doesn't help you with Congress, in other words.) If you want to keep an eye on the mayor, etc., as Jeff suggests, your own state's open-records law probably is what governs access to the relevant records. North Carolina is blessed with one of the country's more public-friendly open-records laws, I'm happy to say. But if you're not from 'round here, the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press has info on all 50 states' laws here.

Second, not to discourage you, but I speak from painful experience when I tell you that many FOIA requests don't get filled anywhere near as quickly or productively as Jeff's did.

Still, the FOIA is for you as much as it is for the N&R, just as the First Amendment is. Indeed, fewer than half the FOIA requests filed each year come from working journalists. So go to it.

And if you stumble across a good story, by all means, get in touch.

Sorry. Let me catch my breath. ... Whew. Man, I haven't laughed so hard in ... I don't know how long.

What prompted that response was this quote from Bradley Belt, executive director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.: "It is imperative that Congress act expeditiously so that the problem doesn't spiral out of control."

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA ...

Ah. Whew. Sorry about that. I just get tickled at the concept of Congress "acting expeditiously" so that a problem "doesn't spiral out of control," seeing as I was around during the S&L crisis. Yeah, that expeditiousness? Will happen.

When porcine aviation commences.

The issue in question is the fact that the PBGC, which pays off corporate pension obligations when the corporations can't, was looking at liabilities 50% higher than assets as of the end of the fiscal year Sept. 30. The corporation doesn't get tax money; its funds come from insurance premiums paid by companies with pension plans.

For now.

Me, I'm just grimly resigned to the likelihood that there's a big ol' mess about to be dumped on American taxpayers. Because this government isn't going to let a bunch of retirees starve (although it might well cut benefits to well below what retirees were promised). And faced with the choice of making corporations live up to their obligations or dumping the problem on taxpayers, the S&L debacle suggests, the government will be doing some very big dumping.

That they might do expeditiously.

This Washington Post story (annoying but free registration required) about a young gay man in a small Oklahoma town who "finds love where he least expects it" -- and that doesn't mean what you probably think it means -- is among the most heart-warming things I've read this year.

Last night's episode of "The West Wing" contained a reference to the Undersecretary of Whimsy in the Department of Metaphor.

I had no idea we had such a thing. Live and learn. However, I have long suspected that we have a Generalissimo of Irony and that the position is way, WAY too powerful.

Well, now that I'm back from my drug-addled weekend, let's get to some of the news that had the temerity to take place during my, uh, unconsciousness ...

The basketbrawl game: I only have one complaint about NBA Commissioner David Stern's handling of this incident -- the punishments were too light. Everyone involved except Ron Artest should have been tossed for the season, and Artest should have been banned from the league. For life. And any season-ticket-holders identified as having taken part in the melee ought to forfeit their tickets. Oh, and criminal charges all around.

Disproportionate, you say? I disagree. But if you think so, well, just be advised that this is the kind of situation in which I fail to see the merits of a proportionate response. If responses to this kind of thing were more often disproportionate, a lot of athletes would think twice about jumping into the stands, a lot of teams and venues would think twice before selling beer after halftime, and fans would think twice about the notion that their overpriced tickets give them license not only to express their views but to hurl projectiles at the objects of their invective.

Congress couldn't agree on intelligence reforms before leaving town for the holidays, but it could spend $2 million on a presidential yacht. Y'know, some jokes just write themselves.

Seems a TV journalist recorded the shooting of an Iraqi prisoner by a Marine and now wishes to talk about it. I'm not passing judgment on the Marine until I know a lot more than I do now about the facts and the context. But I will say this for the photojournalist: He seems to have kept his ethical obligations to all parties in this mess uppermost in his mind and to have handled himself well in a horrible situation. More like him in TV news, please.

Whoever inserted the provision over the weekend in the omnibus spending bill that would have allowed congressional committee chairs unfettered access to any individual or company tax return needs a kharmic enema. If it was an IRS staffer (the least likely scenario, in my humble opinion -- what IRS staffer would want to give that kind of power to Congress?) or a congressional staffer, the culprit should go to jail. If it was a member of Congress, he/she should be impeached and removed from office. This is the kind of thing that makes the tinfoil-hat brigade look a lot more informed.

OK, chew on that for a while. I'm gonna go do some work.

Tom Shales of The Washington Post has written the kind of piece you almost never see anymore in a mainstream news publication, even from a columnist: a 190-proof rant so biting and yet so right that I'm certain the editor who approved running it fears for his job even today. The subject/target: FCC chairman Michael Powell, a martinet whose arrogance and pusillanimity stand out even in a profession, government, whose hallmarks they are. Take it from this ex-broadcaster: Shales couldn't have gotten this any more right with a radio-controlled thermonuclear device, although I'd have paid good money to watch him try.

I can only add that if this were a just nation, bureaucrats like Michael Powell would be beaten and driven across the landscape like extras in "Conan the Barbarian."

Our parent company's flagship publication, The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, has dropped the columnist Michelle Malkin from its op-ed roster. The Pilot's ombudsman, Marvin Lake, explains why.

Malkin has a long history of poorly supported polemic, as journalist David Neiwert and others can document. Moreover, her recent book, "In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror," was thoroughly debunked by Eric Muller, a UNC law prof, and Greg Robinson (details here) before it even was published. This was about an order of magnitude harder to do than smoking out whatever the truth, or "truth," was about the documents in Dan Rather's National Guard story about George W. Bush, and M&R pulled it off in roughly the same period of time, and yet it has gotten nowhere near the attention in the blogosphere that the Rather case got.)

One final note: Some commenters have suggested that a Pilot editorial writer's comment, quoted in Lake's column, that Malkin is an "Asian Ann Coulter" was a gratuitous reference. I think not, in the limited sense that her ethnic background was at least tangentially relevant to the argument she was making about internment in her book. Otherwise, I think her ethnicity has much less to do with her gig, and her performance, than the facts that she and Coulter are both, in no particular order, conservative, female, easy on the eyes and apparently willing to say damn near anything they think might get people's attention, regardless of its factual basis or lack thereof.

The only label any science textbook needs.

(More labels here.)

Would you believe that a school barred a teacher from giving his students copies of the Declaration of Independence because it mentions God? Think carefully before answering because your answer will tell a lot about your relationship to objective reality.

You might or might not recall hearing that while the 2005 omnibus federal spending bill was in conference committee (where differences between House and Senate versions are negotiated or smoothed out) recently, someone slipped in a provision that would have allowed certain senior members of Congress access to anyone's personal or corporate income-tax return. Naturally, the provision was not discovered until after the bill had been voted on.

That provision, we are assured, is now dead, but it raises the question of why members of Congress so often must vote on measures neither they nor their staffs have had time to read.

Liberal blogger Josh Marshall has been discussing a suggestion one of his readers e-mailed him in the wake of this event: Changing House and Senate rules to require at least three days to pass before such a bill or reconciliation (what comes out of the conference committee, where competing versions of a bill are "reconciled") could be voted on. Taking that a step further, Marshall's reader asks, why could not such bills be made available publicly, via the Internet, for a certain minimum period before any vote? That way, the public could weigh in before the final vote.

As Marshall says, there are some reasons not to do things that way, but not any good reasons. I would agree. I'm not naive enough to think it would end the practice of sneaking things into bills in the dead of night, but it might help and it probably couldn't hurt. And there's no reason why we couldn't impose similar requirements upon the N.C. General Assembly, too, for that matter.

What do you think?

... is vodka. I am not, as Dave Barry says, making this up.

(Via Al Tompkins at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.)