Newspaper reporter fired for co-authoring magazine story

The Inside Out blog has a story on a newspaper reporter for the Oregonian being fired for writing a magazine piece without permission from the newspaper.

Most newspaper reporters know they need to clear any outside journalism efforts with their editors before working for another publication.

In the days after Jack Kevorkian assisted with his first suicide, I was contacted by the editor of Newsday and with permission from my editor submitted three or four stories, including one that ran on the front page of Newsday, about my interviews with Jack Kevorkian.

All the stories were merely rewrites of what I had already done for the Journal. It was pretty easy money. About three days in Newsday sent their own reporter to the area and my little gig was up.

I ended up making about $3,500 from the work, which helped by my first real home computer - an Acer, I believe, which in those days had about 1 gig of memory and cost more than $3,000.

How about this beauty of a 'misstatement'

I love it when politicians take a bald faced lie and turn it into a "misstatement." That in itself is a misstatement. When you deliberately tell something over and over that is not true, that is a 'lie.' Just because you surround yourself with combat veterans and call it a misstatement, doesn't change it from the lie that it was.


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Time to shuffle the deck in Washington, D.C.

If we can't have a viable third party, I'll certainly settle for voter anger that takes it out on all incumbents. Watching Arlen Specter concede last night was very gratifying. Good riddance to politicians who have as their overriding principle getting re-elected.

Hopefully the anger, fueled by unbridled spending and mounting deficits in the middle of a continuing economic distress will continue into the fall and voters will take a blanket "throw the bums out" attitude at the polls. Washington is completely broken. The President doesn't get it, the leadership of both parties doesn't get it, but hopefully they'll all get it in November.

In four major races, Mass., N.J. Virginia and now Pennsylvania the President has backed the loser. That's a message whether he wants to hear it, or not.

Time to take our government back. Time for both sides to drop the gloves and pick up the shovels. Time for the President to head back to his office and get to work and stop being in a total campaign mode. People want jobs, not speeches. As he himself said in the last election. "Words, just words..." As an aside remember this little bit of plagarism during the last campaign.

Those of us on the sunset side of our lives are concerned about the country we are leaving our children and grandchildren. We do not want them saddled with a huge debt to pay when we're gone. Time to rein in the spending and time to listen to the voters.

Getting rid of all the incumbents, shuffling the deck and starting over would not be a bad start.