Thursday: Turning the Worm

Sorry I haven’t been around much these days.  Thank you, Katiebird for keeping the place up.  :-) I haven’t got much news this morning but I did hear an interesting interview on The Naked Scientists podcast about the “worms” that television media outlets use during campaign season.  The worm is a graphical overlay on a [...]

The truth is biased

Big Tent Democrat: There is a new celebratory quality to journalism that manifests itself in different ways. In the Beltway, it’s being in with the government In crowd. That means sacrificing objectivity and the truth. Davies seems to have allowed, indeed he appears to be celebrating, his belief that Assange is a loathsome figure (not [...]

Thursday News and Views

Good Morning Conflucians!!! Last night on Anderson Cooper I heard the news that there has been another delay in BP’s efforts to cap their runaway oil well. I couldn’t quite understand what happened, but this morning the news is that engineers found a new leak in a “choke line,” and that is what caused the [...]

Saturday Morning News and Views: May Day Edition

Happy May Day, Conflucians!! It’s the feast of Beltane. In Edinburgh, 12,000 people gathered for the Beltane Fire Festival spring rituals. Here is a little information on the pagan holiday: By Celtic reckoning, the actual Beltane celebration begins on sundown of the preceding day, April 30, because the Celts always figured their days from sundown [...]

Given #1: The media is not your friend

Mike Lux can’t understand why the networks are getting all giddy about the TeaParty movement.  It’s all they ever cover. To be clear, the tea partiers aren’t the only angry people in America. There are plenty of working class swing voters who aren’t inclined to buy into the tea party stew of racism, nativism, and [...]

Saturday Morning News and Views

Good Morning Conflucians!!!! It is 3 degrees here in the Boston western suburbs!! Nevertheless, we are better off than you guys in the southern states where there is a winter storm going on. Yesterday, Texas and Oklahoma got about a foot of snow, and today the storm will move east into the Carolinas and Virgina [...]

Friday Morning: David Shuster is Not a Journalist

Good Morning Conflucians!!! TGIF!!!!!!!! It’s 12 degrees here in the Boston ‘burbs. We had a little January thaw–about four days of temps in around 50 degrees. It was great. But now we’re back in the deep freeze. In fact with the wind child factor, it feels like below zero. So I think I’m going to [...]

First they came for FOX News . . .

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Jake Tapper of ABC asked White House Press Secretary Robert [...]

Open Thread: John Nichols Smacks Down “Whiner in Chief”

This morning at The Nation John Nichols sternly reprimands the Obama administration for its attempts to control “left of left” bloggers with humiliating “off the record” remarks from anonymous administration sources, as well as its childish “war” with Fox News Network Nichols writes: …before the president and his inner circle go all Spiro Agnew on [...]

Monday Morning News and Views, Columbus Day Edition

Today is Columbus Day. That’s an important holiday here in Massachusetts, so I don’t have to teach today. Of course that doesn’t mean I don’t have work to do, but it’s still a nice break from my regular routine. But should we be honoring Christopher Columbus with a holiday? Parades span the country from LA [...]