By Kevin Woster

Sen. Tim Johnson’s office today released the great news that their boss is going home.

Actually, their boss went home - Friday.

As a reporter, I wish I could have known sooner of this important development in Johnson’s recovery. But updates have been limited and often delayed from the very start in the story of the senator and his medical ailments.

We all wish him well in his journey back to the Senate.

I just wish we knew more about the process, and knew it sooner.

I think the public deserves that.

By Bill Harlan

Blogmorites often cite Switzerland in discussions about gun control — low crime, lots of guns — so here’s a story from the Washington Post: “An Armory in Gun-Shy Europe.” An excerpt:

Switzerland, a country of 7.5 million people with an estimated 2 million or more guns in circulation, sits as a heavily armed exception in the heart of Europe, where most countries have strict gun-control laws. Virtually all able-bodied Swiss men are required to serve in the military, which issues them assault rifles or pistols, or both, which they store at home and keep when they leave the service.

But the story also reports:

At a time when the Virginia Tech killings are stirring debate about U.S. gun laws, Switzerland is also weighing new curbs on a robust culture of gun ownership that dates back centuries. Parliament is considering a measure to ban the keeping of ammunition at home. Opposition politicians, backed by a leading women’s magazine, are campaigning to get guns and ammunition out of Swiss homes to be stored in gun clubs and military armories.

Wow. What’s next, names on bank accounts?

By Bill Harlan

I caught part of the short “Inconvenient Truth” updater on HBO last night. Al Gore made the video appendix to his documentary to include additional information, including the 120-degree all-time high temp last summer in Usta. (See the previous Mount Blogmore discussion here.)

By Bill Harlan

I propose an experiment, inspired in part by Kevin’s previous post regarding rants, RapidReply and anonymity.

First, see Kevin’s story on the South Dakota congressional delegation’s latest positions on Iraq. John Thune criticizes the Democratic plan. Stephanie Herseth votes with her Democratic colleagues but says the war is not lost. Tim Johnson weighs in through surrogates. By my latest count, there were 74 responses to this story. Many of these comments fall into the predictable anonymous name-calling so prevalent in the series of tubes I like to call “the Internet.” Against the war, you’re a cowardly traitor. For the war, you’re an evil warmonger. Blah dee blah dee blah.

However, I found interesting a comment from “Reality Check” posted at 4:44 a.m. (Early riser? Post-clubbing denizen of the night?) “Reality Check” compares the costs of occupying Berlin and Baghdad. Click on the link to Kevin’s story, scroll down and check it out. The anaology inspired me to think about Iraq in a new way. So did Roger Cohen’s piece in the New York Times, headlined “The Biggest U.S. Error in Ousting Saddam.” Though the headline highlights the “mistake,” Cohen sides with Gen. David Patraeus rather than congressional Democrats. “Check” and Petraeus argue that a long-term presence in Baghdad will be worth the cost that both agree will be high. I think Cohen’s column requires a sign-up, so here’s the kicker:

Bush says a timetable will demoralize troops, boost the enemy and give America’s foes a means to calibrate their actions in the knowledge that American withdrawal is near. “Don’t you think an enemy is going to wait and adjust based upon an announced timetable of withdrawal?” he told “The Charlie Rose Show.”

It is hard to argue with Bush’s logic there. But if you subscribe to the view that Iraq is lost anyway after so much bungling, it hardly matters. That, in essence, is now the opinion of many Americans.

General David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, has another view. Iraq, he insisted this week, will require “an enormous commitment” and the presence of troops “some years down the road.” He added: “This effort may get harder before it gets easier.”

Those are not surprising words if Iraq is seen as a fundamental effort by the United States to push Middle Eastern history in a new direction, away from police-state tyranny. Such changes do not come overnight.

Because I believe the net impact of American power, mistakes notwithstanding, over the past century has been a freer, more open, more accountable and more rewarding world, I am inclined to heed Petraeus rather than the Democrats in the House.

Where was I? Oh yeah. The experiment, which is to lift a comment from RapidReply and open it to the Mount for further analysis. I throw in Cohen because of his reference to House Democrats, such as Herseth Sandlin, and to contrast the style of argument. Does the Baghdad-Berlin analogy hold virtual water? Are we pushing the Middle East “away from police-state tyranny”?

PS: I’ve always argued in favor of anonymity on the Mount. (Unlike RapidReply, we require a valid e-mail address, which we check from time to time.) I’d miss the likes of Sem Away from Home, Raider Grad Abroad and others. Still, Kevin has a point. Internet rant-o-thons do tend to devolve into blah dee blah dee blah.

By Kevin Woster

Seriously now (and that includes you, Fleming) how many of you would quit making proclamations here on the mountain if we made you identify yourself?

I’ve been encouraging Gutzon Harlan - our esteemed sculptor, mentor, advisor, soothsayer, squad leader and Scout master - to seriously consider the idea of turning Mount Blogmore into a place of named commentators only.

I have struggled mightily from the start with the whole notion of anonymous comments, which goes against a history of accountability in the letters section of every editorial page. I think it’s especially troublesome when nameless commentators challenge, criticize and sometimes take cheap shot at others - whether public officials or private citizens, or Blogmore commentators who use their real names.

I realize this would go against the Internet trend, where anonymous comment is the norm. And I expect some of you wouldn’t comment if we required IDs. But I expect many of your would. And I wonder if requiring IDs would bring new people to the mountain, people who might now hesitate to comment for fear of being attacked by some nameless foe.

Now that we have Rapid Reply on the news stories we post on the RCJ Web site, those who can’t or won’t ID themselves would still have an outlet. And that’s fine, I guess.

But maybe Blogmore could become something different. I think it might elevate us to a refreshing level in the Web log world, making Blogmore a place of commentary and idea exchange more like a newspaper editorial page. It would be more immediate but just as demanding in requiring those with strong opinions to put their names where their mouths, or written words, are.

Gutzon Harlan hasn’t rejected the idea out of hand, but he does worry about stifling the opportunity for comment and reducing the number of regular commentators. And we both wonder, of course, how it would be received by our bosses at the RCJ.

First, however, we wonder how it would be received by you.

By Kevin Woster

I’m for the Argus and its suit against the Rounds administration. The list should be public.

So should most public documents.

But then, as a reporter, I like “public” when it comes to government information.

If I remember correctly - an increasingly dubious possibility - Bill Janklow didn’t worry much about protecting his list of hunters. And Janklow is the guy who turned the little good-old-boy pheasant hunt begun by Joe Foss into a gala promotional and economic-development affair.

In fact, it seems like you could actually see a list of the hunting teams - with the names of the members - at the hunt headquarters.

I remember scanning the lists while I was working for the Argus, just to see which team would be most interesting to cover.

Sometimes I got invited. Sometimes I just showed up with a notebook and camera. That’s how I happened to be walking next to a Citicorp big whig when he accidentally shot a hen.

That was an interesting story. And it prompted a, uh, lively conversation with Janklow after it ran in the Argus.

I must admit, I kind of miss those fiery exchanges.

By Kevin Woster

Don Frankenfeld raises an issue down in the foothills that’s been explored before here on the mountain: Who gave the $750,000 to Roger Hunt’s corporation - the one he apparently set up to accept money from and provide cover for the donor who gave such timely help to VoteYes folks in the last campaign?

So, let’s go there again.

Best guess: Who was it?

The winner gets to go pheasant hunting with Harlan and me.

By Bill Harlan

Should the state of South Dakota have to release the names of those invited to the governor’s pheasant hunt? See the AP story. The Argus Leader says yes, the public should know. I say we should follow federal example: release only the names of participants accidentally shot by the lieutenant governor.

Bt Bill Harlan

South Dakota is a gun-owning state, and this topic still has legs on Blogmore, so I offer two links. First, a Washington Post blog item “VA Tech Doesn’t Move Needle on Gun Control. An excerpt:

Two new polls indicate that there’s been little change in public support for gun control since last week’s shooting rampage on the campus of Virginia Tech.
An ABC News poll released yesterday found that 61 percent favor stricter gun control laws; the same percentage as in a Post-ABC poll last October and virtually unchanged in polls since 1989.

Second, the Pew Trust report “Little Boost for Gun Control or Agreement on Causes.”

By Bill Harlan

Maybe my “gulag” headline was a little sensational. That’s the term lefties use, but it’s not like we’re locking up people in remote prisons far from public scrutiny. Well, we’re not doing that to U.S. citizens. But we do lock up lots of people. Here’s the lede on an AP story in today’s paper:

PIERRE — South Dakota led the nation with an 11 percent increase in its prison population in 2005, and a new national report estimates the trend will continue, mostly because of drug crimes, parole violations and more women being sent to prison.

But state Corrections Secretary Tim Reisch said he thinks the population boom has ebbed.

Here’s the lede and link for the Pew Trust report:

After a 700-percent increase in the U.S. prison population between 1970 and 2005, you’d think the nation would finally have run out of lawbreakers to put behind bars.

But according to Public Safety, Public Spending: Forecasting America’s Prison Population 2007- 2011, a first-of-its-kind projection, state and federal prisons will swell by more than 192,000 inmates over the next five years.

This 13-percent jump triples the projected growth of the general U.S. population, and will raise the prison census to a total of more than 1.7 million people. Imprisonment levels are expected to keep rising in all but four states, reaching a national rate of 562 per 100,000, or one of every 178 Americans.

And here’s an excerpt from a 2003 report from The Sentencing Project:

“For comparative purposes, the U.S. now locks up its citizens at a rate 5-8 times that of the industrialized nations to which we are most similar, Canada and western Europe.”

And just for fun, a graphic from a 2000 report from the Center for Juvenile Criminal Justice:

Are Americans just plain bad? Or is it like Jessica Rabbit said: We’re not bad, we’re just drawn that way.

By Bill Harlan

A judge has promised to rule within a couple weeks whether Roger Hunt has to reveal who donated $750,000 to voteyesforlife.com. Guess the day of the decision and the results and win … the thanks of a grateful Mount Blogmore. We have an AP analysis story up now, but the story about today’s court proceedings should be up within minutes.

By Bill Harlan

Kevin W. and I each exchanged e-mails recently with a Blogmorite who offered a provocative comment that used the N-word and another racial epithet. The offending words were used in ironic and hyperbolic fashion to make a point about the evils of racism and hypocrisy. (The topic was the Imus brouhaha.) Still, we declined to allow that word to be used here.

My thought was, there is no context in which a white guy can use the N-word — unless maybe he’s Quentin Tarantino, which I’m not. And even QT treads on thin ice or — even worse — Vanilla Ice.

Still, the excised comment made me think. Then I ran across Emily Bernard’s essay “Teaching the N-Word; A black professor, an all-white class, and the thing nobody will say.” You can find it in The American Scholar or in the anthology “The Best American Essays 2006″ at bookstores.

And speaking of race, I just finished Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Like No Other Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.” Goodwin writes extensively about racism on the homefront during World War II, when the N-word was used by members of Congress. In those sections Goodwin often refers to African Americans as “Negroes,” a polite term back in the day but not so much now — unless you’re Samuel L. Jackson in “Pulp Fiction,” which I’m not.

Anyway, Goodwin just spoke here, so I thought I’d throw that tidbit into the racism discussion.

By Bill Harlan

Might the Supreme Court’s recent upholding of the partial-birth abortion law have a bearing on South Dakota’s court-challenged informed consent law?

Justice Anthony Kennedy writing for the majority:

“The state has an interest in ensuring so grave a choice is well informed. (Emphasis added) It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with griev more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming the human form.”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing in dissent, noted the majority conceded finding “no reliable data” to back of the sorrow-and-anguish assertion. (It’s “self evident.”) Ginsburg wrote:

“Revealing in this regard, the court invokes an antiabortion shibboleth for which it concededly has no reliable evidence: Women who have abortions come to regret their choices, and consequently suffer from ‘(s)evere depression and loss of esteem.’ Because of women’s fragile emotional state and because of the ‘bond of love the mother has for her child’ the Court worries, doctores may withhold information about the nature of the intact D&E procedure. The solution the Court approves, then, is not to require doctors to inform women accurately and adequately, of the different procedures and their attendent risks. … Instead, the Court deprives women of the right to make an autonomous choice, even at the expense of their safety.”

See the 73-page opinion here. See also an NYT story along those lines. An excerpt from that story:

The South Dakota Legislature has also enacted an “informed consent” law requiring doctors to tell a patient seeking an abortion that “the pregnant woman has an existing relationship” with the “unborn human being” in her uterus. Whether the state can require such a script is a question that was argued last week before the federal appeals court in St. Louis. The language would be unlikely to raise alarms at the Supreme Court, based on the majority opinion on Wednesday.

One of our occasional visitors here on the mountain - Duane’s Depressed - sent notice of the upcoming PBS special “Buying the War” with Bill Moyers next Wednesday.

The special focuses on how the news media failed to provide the necesssary counterbalance of skeptical investigation into pro-Iraq-War pronouncments by the Bush Administration and others leading up to the invasion.

Not doubt, it’ll be worth watching.

But for now, how about a top-10 list of the worst-covered stories by the news media in South Dakota?

What are we missing, or have we missed?

What went undercovered?

Where do we show bias?

Is there chance for redemption?

By Kevin Woster

I’m troubled by the idea of airing the VT shooter’s suicide diatribe.

Why give him such a prominent forum? And why add to the grief and anger of those who lost family and friends?

Yet, I can’t say for certain that I wouldn’t have used the material myself, if it had been sent to me as a reporter.

Maybe I need counseling, or a sharp slap in the face.

By Kevin Woster

We’ll have to talk about the partial-birth abortion ban.

And what it means to abortion rights overall.

And what it means to the anti-abortion movement in South Dakota, and the 2008 state Legislature.

And what it says about Supreme Court nominations.

There’s just no getting around it now.

Is there?

By Kevin Woster

OK, here’s where my Lyman County comes out, again.

Watching news reports of the VT shootings, I had a couple of thoughts:

* Do we need more gun control, or more guns?

Does this prove the need for more stringent gun regulations and more intensive background checks?

Or do the NRA fellas have a point when they say a better armed citizenry might put an end to horrors like this before they kill so many innocents?

Is it simple lunacy to ponder the idea that a properly armed, trained and permitted VT student or faculty member might have ended that carnage well before 32 victims were dead?

Or does it make some sense?

By Bill Harlan

Pennington County Sheriff’s Department Investigator Mark Alley lets parents back onto the grounds of Grandview Elementary School. Police got a report of “shots fired,” but it was never confirmed. Now it’s almost certain there no gunfire.

An allegedly slow law enforcement response has been raised as an issue in the Virginia Tech massacre. Now comes Rapid City’s incident and incidents around the country. (See our AP story and the WashPo, which cites Rapid City.)

The report turned out to be false, turned in by a 15-year-old who is now in trouble. The local response, however, was instructive and enlightening. Law enforcement and school officials had plans in place and they took no chances. Early reviews are good.

Parents and kids reunite at Grandview Elementary.

South Dakota Army National Guard Sgt. Heath Huehl leads son Brayden, 5, from the Grandview Elementary School.

Editor’s note: Local news editor Steve Miller interviewed Doris Kearns Goodwin. See his story in today’s paper. (Goodwin speaks here Wednesday evening.) Steve told me he could have written two stories about the interview. I said, welcome to Mount Blogmore! BH

By Steve Miller

Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Pulitzer-Prize winning author and historian, said she was worried.

Goodwin has written about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, the Kennedys, Lyndon Johnson and Abraham Lincoln. But she wasn’t worried about the state of the country. Well, maybe she was, but she didn’t say. She did say she was worried about Red Sox first baseman David Ortiz. Goodwin, a die-hard Red Sox fan, said the big slugger wasn’t hitting. “It’s ridiculous to worry, of course,” she said. But, hey, she’s a Sox fan. (She also assured me that Josh Beckett would be the Sox best pitcher this year. So far, she’s right.)

Maybe it was an odd way to start an interview with a noted historian, but we got into it naturally. She said the weather was lousy and I asked her what it would be like for the Sox home opener. I’m a relative latecomer to Red Sox Nation, having started following them in 1976, when Yaz, Jim Rice, Carlton Fisk, Dewey Evans and big George “Boomer” Scott whacked the ball around Fenway Park. Goodwin grew up a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. She wrote about that in Wait Till Next Year.

We talked about her historical biographies, too — particularly her compelling 2005 book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. I was fascinated by the fact that she was two years into her research before she decided to focus her book on Lincoln’s relationships with his fractious Cabinet. Two years. For most newspaper reporters, a big long-term project lasts two weeks. Most of the research we do for stories is done in five or six phone calls in an afternoon, followed by a couple of hours of furious writing.

I failed to pin her down on what she thought of the current president, but she said the great presidents like Lincoln and FDR had the chance to be great when they encountered great challenges. As she reported in her book, the young Lincoln was worried that there wouldn’t be any great challenges for his generation. He needn’t have worried, of course.

Bush’s opportunity came with Sept. 11, 2001. But she would say only that Bush’s legacy will be tied to how the war in Iraq. “The main response to the war on terror became the war in Iraq,” she said. “Everything will turn on how that turns out.”

Goodwin did say that she is extremely proud of her son Joe, who recently got out of the Army after serving a year in Iraq as a combat platoon leader, winning a Bronze Star for valor. He graduated from college in June 2001 with a degree in history and literature and “with no thought about the Army,” she said. He joined up after Sept. 11. She was also proud that Joe had written an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe, arguing that America is not really at war — only the soldiers and their families are at war.

Goodwin is working on a book about Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. She was noncommittal about whether she would come out to the Dakotas to research TR’s life out here in the 1880s. But she didn’t rule it out.

By the way, Goodwin praised one of the questions I posed to her in our interview. I wish I had thought of it, but the question came from the Blogmorite known as TimH. A god of Blogmore, Bill Harlan, upon learning I would interview Goodwin, invited Blogmorites to submit questions. TimH asked whether history would be kinder to Bill Clinton, who made relatively benign foreign policy decisions and had at least some success on the domestic side but who led a scandal plagued personal life, or to George W. Bush, who has been a comparative paragon of virtue in his personal life but who has struggled on the policy front, especially foreign policy.( See the story for her answer.)

Goodwin hung in there with me for about 45 minutes with me. She granted one of those interviews that is energizing to the reporter, partly because she offered “good stuff,” and partly because her intelligence is so wide-ranging and engaging.

And it didn’t hurt that she could talk with authority about the Red Sox. Beckett won his third game Monday and Big Popi hit his fourth home run. Life is good. But Goodwin, like all true Sox fans, will still worry.

By Bill Harlan

Mount Blogmore already has dissected the Tom Daschle’s influence on a campaign I like to call “Obama-rama.” Howard Fineman at Newsweek took a whack at that topic earlier this month.

See also Alice Cherbonnier of the Baltimore Chronicle, who says South Dakota’s court-challenged informed-consent abortion law did not go far enough. She suggests informed consent for military recruits.