Letters to the Editor
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Please...
Can someone send Chris Matthews a copy of 'Ballad of a Thin Man'?
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Nequals1, I have bookmarked...
...your infection-fighting comment for future reference, hopefully unneeded... but thank you just the same.
bystander, I love your anecdote about the TA who was a non-native English speaker.
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At Last, Rejecting Being Treated Like Fools?
(Full disclosure: I'm for Edwards.)
If HRC becomes the next President -- rather than comprehending that this is a repudiation of their bias and distortion, the MSM will drag us through years of 'Why Bill Harms Our Country Advising The President', and the kind of sly references to adultery, impeachment and cigars. I don't believe they're smart enough to know what may have just happened in Iowa and New Hampshire.
A Hillary Clinton Presidency would probably result, for much of the MSM, in a new low in Hillary-hating; some 'journalists' may just be hoping for it as a twisted sort of career opportunity. Even so, what the media already has been doing to Hillary, or Obama, just in the past few weeks may not have had the effect they intended.
News editors, reporters and columnists (and the corporations which own them) don't appear to understand or care that "news reporting" in America has become little more than entertainment, a venue for distorted journalism and advertising sales -- and, they don't understand the public may finally be rejecting all of that.
The public would also be rejecting what the MSM's distortion and disrespect of the public represents, and begun to show that in Iowa and New Hampshire where it counts -- at the polls.
As Atrios put it (regarding Maureen Dowd's column about HRC in today's New York Times), "These people [the NYT reporting staff Dowd quoted] are all broken." Chris Matthews' shallow remarks on CNN last night (currently making the rounds in YouTube clips) showed me he's oblivious to the effect of his loud, empty commentary.
David Brooks, O'Reilly, Tom Friedman, Novak, Joe Klein; Time and Newsweek, CNN and Fox... all of 'these people' Atrios described, the media venues which serve up inflated egoism and distortion as hard news, are daily becoming less relevant than they like to believe they are in shaping American culture and influencing events. The fringe rantings of a Limbaugh or Wiener, Coulter or Malkin, are already irrelevant.
A majority of people in the United States are desperate to escape from a culture dominated by an agenda personified in seven years of Cheney / Bush. Things are changing. But, as usual, the corporate media doesn't, and won't, understand this. According to the corporate managers, the news directors, editors and pundits, we're a gullible, easily-led mob of Rubes who will accept whatever line they choose to sell, between commercials.
Tom Brokaw, at least, has had some experience in a journalism that reported facts, the truth of events, and stood by them rather than allowing them to be obscured in a sea of right-wing talking points. Brokaw's mentors in the business understood and remembered Edward R. Murrow.
Perhaps Brokaw retained enough of that to make his cautious observations to Chris Matthews -- to whom Murrow, Menken or Cronkite are only names.
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'bop
Will you remind me of your mailing address?
Or email me: bamage02atyahoodotcom
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@Bamage
Think you're overstating the position of most Drug Reformers by going the Libertarian laissez-faire route. I think it's more like, "tax & regulate sales via a mechanism akin to alcohol".
-- bamage
It depends on who you are talking about and the alcohol model wasn't always so great, either. Only recently they relaxed the regulations over the amount of beer you could make at home. That's why all the micro breweries started appearing. Some have been quite up front about what they propose and that's why I resist those proposals. It's complicated and no simple solutions are acceptable.
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@Bop
anytime brother...pengwenn34@yahoo.com
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okay. why not? We only live a thousand more times? Be alive, or just once?
P.O. Box 101.
Clear Spring, Maryland. 21722
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OT Federal Judge Orders White House to Report on Missing E-Mails
By Pete Yost, AP, 01/09/08 9:02 AM PT
U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola's court order "is going to force the White House to actually explain something about the situation and what they've done about the missing e-mails," said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel at the National Security Archive. Facciola gave the White House five business days to report whether computer backup tapes contain e-mails written between 2003 and 2005.
A federal magistrate ordered the White House on Tuesday to reveal whether copies of possibly millions of missing e-mails are stored on computer backup tapes.
The order by U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola comes amid an effort by the White House to scuttle two lawsuits that could force the Executive Office of the President to recover any e-mail that has disappeared from computer servers where electronic documents are automatically archived.
Two federal laws require the White House to preserve all records including e-mail.
http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/61120.html
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Had the card in my hand...
Now I can't find the darn stamps!
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On Jaded Banter and Phone Based Polling...
I agree with Glenn on most of this, and it is fun to watch Chris Matthews blame it all on the pollsters. But two things:
One: I think, Glenn, you go a little too far for condemning trade related banter. People are only human, even media people. I used to work in a hospice; you should have heard some of the jokes by doctors and nurses, who nevertheless, gave their all for their patients. The problem with the media is that what would be in any other profession pressure-relieving banter amongst insiders, actually seeps into their on air and on page analysis and has taken the place of objective analysis. But you can't blame that all on the pundits; I think people are tuning in to watch exactly that. The national debate has been replaced with the national water cooler gossip fest.
Two: I got into a little bit of a tiff with some people on these pages yesterday when I condemned phone based polling as not very useful at best, and at worst dangerous. There are many scenarios one can imagine that arose from the media's fixation with the polling horse race--perhaps Obama would have won NH, if polling hadn't made Clintn look like the underdog, bringing supporters who would have stayed home out into the brisk night air. We on the left also rely heavily on phone based polls. They are convenient, of course, but there is no way to know whether they are reliable idicators of public opinion, or instead are shaping it to fit the views of the over fifty demographic that still has a lan line and answers their phone cold. The same can be said for the way the media calls races with less than two thirds of the polling places counted. That's an old fight that people have seemed to give up on, but still has a toxic effect on democracy.
This is not to say that polling is not of value. Exit polling seems to be pretty accurate by all accounts, and door to door polling also works pretty well, as well as public square polls (which have practically disappeared with the advent of automated telemarkeing technologies). Just saying, I think that polling has been reduced to phoning because you can have a poll about something an hour after it's happened.