September 25, 2005
The New York Times’ Public Editor, Byron Calame, is calling Times Editor Bill Keller, and by extension the Times, to account. In his column Even Geraldo Deserves a Fair Shake he points out the Time’s TV Critic Alessandra Stanley made a factual error about an event that she observed on TV. She claimed that Geraldo [...]
September 8, 2005
I needed a laugh.
In a Time story on Michael Brown’s resume when he became deputy head of FEMA, his former boss says,
He was very loyal. He was always on time. He always had on a suit and a starched white shirt.
Well with creditials like that, no wonder he has gone so far in the Bush [...]
June 29, 2005
Kevin Drum is in favor of a national shield law for reporters. This law would protect the ability of reporters to conceal their sources in federal courts. Similar protections for reporters exist in some states - California is one, and would be similar to the protections given to priests, lawyers and physicians, among others.
As Kevin [...]
June 28, 2005
Arrrgh!
Dave Eggers and friends weigh in on teacher compensation. They make many good points. Teachers don’t make much for their education and experience. They work under the supervision of politicians and are forced to teach to examinations that have little bearing on education.
Why don’t they address the elephant in the room of teacher’s salaries?
Teaching jobs [...]
June 27, 2005
The blogsphere is like a nuclear reactor. Every so often some topic will launch a chain reaction, this reaction will achieve criticality and the whole thing will go nuclear.
The latest victim is Rick Santorum, a perennial favorite, who I have defended before. Last Friday in the Philadelphia Daily News John Baer referred to [...]
June 23, 2005
Donald Rumsfeld spoke to congressional committees today. In his prepared statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee he said,
Timing in war is never predictable — there are no guarantees. We can and will prevail, but only if we persevere.
Rumsfeld has this habit of making statements that are simply internally contradictory. If there are no guarantees [...]
June 20, 2005
This wasn’t something I knew about or was expecting when I started talking about two kinds of people, but tomorrow’s New York Times has an article on some political scientists’ recent discovery of genetics.
Using twin studies they have determined the heritability of various opinions. The graphic in the article reports on “Genetic Contribution to [...]
June 18, 2005
There are two kinds of people.
People who think there are two kinds of people, and those who don’t.
Rimshot!
If you laughed at that you are the first person to do so in the more than 15 years I have been repeating that line. Which says a lot about me. And you too, if you laughed.
So if [...]
June 14, 2005
I keep reading Christopher Hitchens’ distortions of reality in Slate. I don’t know why. It just pisses me off.
Let’s start at the end and work our way forward:
“It surely expresses a covert sympathy with the aims and objectives of jihad and an overt, if witless and sinister, hatred of the United States.”
I love my country. [...]
June 11, 2005
After finishing off my last post about Anne Applebaum’s logical confusions about Amnesty International’s use of the word gulag in relation to the Untied States, I came across a couple of other tabs that I had kept open because I meant to post something about them.
This article from the New York Times shows that Amnesty [...]