I am disappointed in Pat Leahy. The good senator from Vermont and I probably agree on more issues than disagree. But we do disagree on his Protect Intellectual Property Act, also known as PIPA. You may have heard of PIPA, or its more notorious House counterpart, SOPA. Many notable web sites have gone dark or [...]
Fine, fine we’ve all beaten up on Comic Sans at one point or another. It’s inspired loads of discussion online, most of it quite ferocious ridicule. (You can see some hilarious examples at Comic Sans Criminal.) Still, we’re all pretty accustomed to it, no? In LOLing e-mail forwards and cobbled-together personal websites, that kind of [...]
Happened yesterday, when the ruling party rammed the legislation through the National Assembly. Not exactly tears of joy; an opposition lawmaker set off a teargas canister:
As an addendum to the previous post, I discovered that the Seoul city council had a brawl of their own over the very school lunches that triggered the latest political turmoil in the country: And a bonus example of politicians behaving badly from 2009 when opposition were upset at the GNP’s relaxing media ownership rules:
Probably not, but a controversy over mid-day meals makes it a little more complicated for Korea. Earlier this month, the president of South Korea visited the United States. Remember that? They went to a General Motors plant. They had a state dinner featuring Texas rib eye. Harold (of Harold and Kumar) sat across from Barack [...]
Apologies to Joao Silva/New York Times for using their photo. But look: American soldiers walking past a spray-painted blast wall in Al Awad, Iraq, yesterday. The first time I voted in a presidential election was in the 2000 election. I was a senior in college in New Hampshire. I voted absentee in Alaska. Before election [...]
When Ted Stevens was found guilty of all seven charges of failing to report gifts last week, the conventional wisdom, at least in the Lower 48, was that the Republicans had lost another Senate seat. I’m inclined to agree. But with reservations. Because if there’s any place that will surprise you politically (other than Minnesota, [...]
The news these days is the sort that inspires a lot of confusion, and when there’s confusion, there is no shortage of arm-waving, all-of-a-sudden experts buzzing around. You know what I mean: the street-corner authority: the pedestrian who sees a house on fire or a car accident, and then when anyone asks, “Hey, what’s going [...]
The press is so totally in the tank for the Obama-Biden ticket. “My homeboy”? What kind of an example does this set for young journalists? Adorable. He did a good job. But I kept worrying that this would turn into a segment from a program called Wonder Showzen: Beat Kids.
A forward link landed in my e-mail yesterday. It led me to a 13-second lark trying to portray John McCain as Oswald C. Cobblepot, better known as the Penguin, from Batman. You can see it here: The Penguin is surely one of the more entertaining Batman villains–my favorite, if we’re working from the 1960s television [...]
A few days ago, the Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed toward a brief CNN discussion on how best to call the candidates out. The reporter Candy Crowley prevaricates, pointing out that Obama’s side tells its share of the inaccurate statements about McCain. But Mark Halperin clarifies that McCain’s inaccurate statements are much more central to [...]
Chris Matthews recently interviewed a McCain representative named Nancy Pfotenhauer. He followed up on her answers, and had statistics in hand. He called her out. If journalism, especially television journalism, was simply meant to provide an outlet for the various sides of a campaign to get their messages out, without any additional probing or challenges–well, [...]
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