This HuffPo piece strikes me as just about right. Look, I don’t think Sarah Palin is terribly bright, but even I assume that if she can deliver a speech without notes, she can remember four or five bullet-point “priorities” without recourse to a list scrawled on her hand. If, for some reason, she couldn’t, I […]
Entries Tagged as 'Journalism & the Media'
Please Don’t Throw Me in the Briar Patch!
February 10th, 2010 · 28 Comments
Tags: Horse Race Politics · Journalism & the Media
Our Fragile Democracy
February 3rd, 2010 · 27 Comments
Ok, so, I get both the legal and the substantive beefs people have with Citizens United. I’m basically a “political speech? well, bugger off” sort of guy, so all this business about whether corporations are +3 paladins or whatever just doesn’t interest me, but I understand the arguments. Bracketing all that, though, if you really […]
Tags: Journalism & the Media
Paternalism and Campaign Finance Law
January 22nd, 2010 · 28 Comments
Something that’s implicit in a lot of defenses of the Citizens United ruling I’ve seen in the past day is probably worth noting explicitly: The ban on independent corporate/union expendituures for “electioneering communications” that the court struck down was actually quite narrow. Basically it covered TV and radio advertising, and didn’t touch myriad other forms […]
Tags: Horse Race Politics · Journalism & the Media · Law
Conservative Philosophy Returns?
December 23rd, 2009 · 19 Comments
A long New York Times profile this weekend advances the proposition that philosopher Robert P. George—whose work I first encountered back in college—is now “this country’s most influential Christian conservative thinker.” I have my doubts, but to the extent the profile itself helps make the claim more true, that’ll be welcome. Andrew Sullivan argues—and I […]
Tags: General Philosophy · Journalism & the Media
To Release or Not to Release
November 24th, 2009 · 9 Comments
The New York Times is catching flak for declining to post those hacked climate change e-mails, since (ho ho!) they’ve leaked classified information in the past. This strikes me as a rather silly comparison. In the instance most of the critics are thinking about, the Times got wind of a massive and almost certainly illegal […]
Tags: Journalism & the Media
Every Man an Anchor on the Goodship Palin
November 24th, 2009 · 14 Comments
Last week over lunch, a friend and I found ourselves musing over how it was that the blogosphere—meant to free us at last from the tyranny of media gatekeepers—so often wind up stampeding after the same trivia as cable networks anchored to a 24-hour news cycle. Look, I’m ODed on the health care debate too, […]
Tags: Journalism & the Media
Bring the Paine
November 17th, 2009 · 1 Comment
Apparently Glenn Beck is into Thomas Paine these days. I recommend a dramatic reading from The Age of Reason. Or would inducing that level of cognitive dissonance be cruel?
Tags: Journalism & the Media
¡Douthat Libre!
November 17th, 2009 · Comments Off on ¡Douthat Libre!
Ross finally gets a blog at the Times. Glad to know you guys are listening. Now let’s talk about MoDo…
Tags: Journalism & the Media
Phoning It In
November 11th, 2009 · 6 Comments
Two notes on Wade Goodwyn’s Morning Edition report from the Ft. Hood memorial service. First: As the mourners walked away under a brilliant Texas sky, their mood did not match the weather. It’s embarrassing enough that he was contemplating a clichéd “their faces were as overcast as the sky” transition at all. But when the […]
Tags: Journalism & the Media
Minitrue
November 11th, 2009 · 1 Comment
Even by Fox standards, this is pretty shameless:
Tags: Journalism & the Media