Depression (Both Kinds) Is a Government Conspiracy

McClatchy picks up an article from the Fresno Bee, about Mendota, California, where unemployment is 41% and people don’t have $1 to pay for a blouse in a thrift shop:

The Anonymity Files, #2

The Washington Post, “Detainee’s Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots,” by Peter Finn and Joby Warrick, March 29, 2009:

Lobbyists

Are lobbyists the scum of the earth?  Hmm-m-m-m.  I guess the jury is still out on that one.  Maybe. But when it comes to transparency in government, I see President Obama is standing by/enforcing one of his campaign promises.  And no one in Washington hates change more than lobbyists.  According to Politico Free speech advocates [...]

The Anonymity Files

I have decided to start a new continuing series about news articles that rely solely or mostly on anonymous sources. Glenn Greenwald has written a lot about this phenomenon, and it seems to me that almost every article in the mainstream media that’s investigative in nature or has something to do with policy or anything [...]

Crazy Is Her Brand Name

Judson Berger at Fox News has an interesting profile of Michele Bachmann. She cultivates her reputation for bizarre public behavior to manage her political career: She called for an expose to root out members of Congress who are “anti-America.” She gave President George W. Bush a public hug and a kiss so famously awkward one [...]

Sarah Palin, Classy As Always

Gov. Palin refused to pray with other McCain campaign staffers before the election. How do we know this? Because she said it, to a roomful of Alaskan Republicans last week: In a speech she gave to the Alaska GOP last week, Palin told the story of the lead-up to her debate with Joe Biden, saying, [...]

Border Region

Dan Rather has a weekly program on HDNet.  Unfortunately, at the HD.net web site they only post a 38 second teaser of the hour long show.  If you cannot watch it on your TV, they want you to buy a DVD of the show. However, that takes nothing away from Dan Rather’s presentation.  I mention [...]

Amazing Media Self-Absorption

It’s not often that I laugh (appreciatively rather than mockingly) at anything Mary Katharine Ham writes, but she quite wittily captures the narcissistic self-absorption of CNN’s Ed Henry in his “after-action report” after the news conference last night (emphasis in original): Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed Ed Henry’s question for the President last night, [...]

Surviving Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Japan has certified a 93-year-old man as the only known survivor of both atomic bombings in August 1945: Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip on 6 August 1945 when a US plane dropped the first atomic bomb. He suffered serious burns and spent a night there before returning to his home city [...]

GOP to Cheney: Think About the Party, For a Change

TheHill.com: Congressional Republicans are telling Dick Cheney to go back to his undisclosed location and leave them alone to rebuild the Republican Party without his input. Displeased with the former vice-president’s recent media appearances, Republican lawmakers say he’s hurting  GOP efforts to reinvent itself after back-to-back electoral drubbings. [...] Rep. John Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.) said, [...]