DougThompson.Com

It is that surreal time of morning. First light, just before the sun rises over the mountains to the East. The fog not yet lifted, the birds not yet awake and the human inhabitants not yet out and stirring.
You walk along the quiet road, captured by the beauty and surrounded by the serenity of the morning. The bitter, 25-degree temperatures nip at your cheeks but you don’t mind.
Morning has come and you welcome the start of a new day.

At first glance, the skeptic in all of us would say this shot of the back side Buffalo Mountain in Floyd County, Virginia, has been Photoshopped.
It hasn’t.
On a cloudy day when the clouds dropped right down to the top of the mountain, the morning light provided the right balance for saturated colors. I shot the image on a Nikon D1H at 200 ISO with the white balance set on tungsten which provided more saturation but that was it.
Photoshop? We don’t need no stinkin’ Photoshop. Well, actually, we do but just not in this case

Smith Mountain Lake, Franklin County, Virginia, early morning.
As development on the lake booms, scenes like this become harder to find. Lakefront homes, restaurants with boat docks, public access ramps all litter the landscape. Of course the farmers who lost their land when the power company flooded the valleys to create the lake to power a hydro-electric dam can argue that the view was never that great anyway. Not when you consider what it costs them.
Can progress and natural beauty coexist? Good question.

Return of The King, the final installment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, leads the Oscar nominations, which comes as no surprise to anyone who has watched the three films.

Peter Jackson’s monumental film effort is incredible on several levels:

1–It is incredibly faithful to the books;

2–The three films are some nine hours of total viewing time yet manage to hold the viewer’s attention throughout;

3–And, for a change, we have three films featuring incredible special effects that did not come out of George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic studios.

If the film sweeps Oscar night, as it should, each and every award will be justly deserved.

In 1972, I stood in the freezing weather and snow outside the offices of the Manchester Union-Leader in New Hampshire and watched Senator Edmund Muskie break down in tears and destroy his Presidential campaign.

Muskie,
the clockers and watchers said, didn’t have what it took to be
President. Potential Presidents of the United States don’t lose it and
start crying just because a conservative, hard-ass publisher like Bill Loeb of the Union-Leader writes a nasty editorial.

That was my first Presidential campaign, traveling as one of the “boys on the bus,”
the entourage of reporters who followed the primary season. The 1972
campaign started with Muskie as the pre-emptive frontrunner to win the
Democratic nomination and challenge Richard M. Nixon, the incumbent Republican.

Flash
forward 32 years. I’m back on the bus (although the bus now is an
airplane and there are women on it) and watching another pre-emptive
frontrunner, Howard Dean, melt down under the stress of a campaign.

Earlier
this week, Dean — the former Vermont governor who was supposed to
cakewalk his way to the nomination — fell apart in the final days
before the Iowa caucuses and finished a disappointing third. He first
took his anger out on his senior staff in a temper tantrum that left
many shaking, then stormed onto the stage at his campaign headquarters
and self-destructed in a red-faced, arm-waving shoutfest that looked to all there like a man out of control.

“It
hurt him,” Democratic consultant and pundit Jim Carville said. “You may
have just watched the beginning of the end of the Dean campaign for
President.”

A
lot of things have changed in politics over the past three decades. In
1972, as a print reporter covering the campaign, I took notes, then
sought out a phone so I could call my office and dictate, off the
top-of-my head a story for the next day’s edition. I had a manual
portable typewriter with me but most of us chose to dictate stories to
a rewrite man back at the office.

That was the way stories were filed.

On
the trail today, I’m shooting video, not writing for a newspaper, and
besides a digital video camera, I have two laptop computers, three
wireless phones, a wireless modem, a satellite modem and a BlackBerry.
I shoot video, upload the tape into the laptop, edit it on the spot,
and shoot the final product to Washington where it can be shown
immediately or edited further for use later in the day.

Stories
are written and sent immediately, either through a wireless or sat
modem or through a Wi-Fi (wireless) network. No waiting, no searching
for a free phone, no delay. Instant news. Fast-food journalism.

What
hasn’t changed, though, is the ability of a candidate to self-destruct
because of a lost temper, a lapse in judgment or plain, simple
stupidity.

Dean
claims he was simply trying to rally is young army of campaign workers
but those of us who have watched campaigns for the past three decades
have seen this before: Ed Muskie crying on the back of a truck in the
New Hampshire snow or Gary Hart challenging reporters to “follow me
around” to see if he was cheating on his wife and then having Donna
Rice spend the night at his Washington townhouse where reporters who
camped out all night caught her leaving the next morning. Or Bob Dole’s
lost temper in 1996 when he shouted “stop lying” to Bill Clinton. These
little moments tell us that the man who wants to be king may not be up
to the job.

Dean’s
meltdown played out live before a national TV audience Monday night and
became instant fodder for late night TV hosts, who played it again and
again. David Letterman’s technical wizards modified the tape so Dean’s
head exploded at the end of his tirade.

Now Dean trails Kerry in the New Hampshire polls (a day earlier he was leading).

In
1972, Ed Muskie’s tears appeared in a brief news clip on two national
newscasts (NBC and CBS. ABC did not run it). According to the ratings
of the time, less than 150,000 people saw it (although many more read
about it in newspapers).

This
week, Howard Dean’s red-faced shoutfest appeared on five broadcast news
networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS and Fox), four late-night talk shows (Jay
Leno, David Letterman and Conon O’Brien), four network news morning
shows (Today, CBS This Morning, ABC Good Morning and Fox Morning News)
and six cable TV news channels (CNN, CNN Headline News, MSNBC, CNBC,
Fox and BBC). The combined audiences for all these shows is 95 million
Americans. A quick check of the Internet shows video of the speech is
also available on more than 100 web sites.

Politicians
still make fools of themselves. That hasn’t changed. What hasn’t
changed is the ability for more people to watch them