Newsweek’s Howard Fineman seems to be smoking the crack
Howard Fineman on the Chris Matthews Show, discussing the Democrats in 2008:
Mr. FINEMAN: If they can’t win this one, the Democrats deserve to go the way of the Whigs, which is a political party that disappeared. Now why did it disappear? It disappeared because it couldn’t deal with the biggest issue of the time, which was slavery.
MATTHEWS: Right.
Mr. FINEMAN: So I’m thinking, what’s the issue this time that could render the Democrats useless to history? And the answer is–if there is one, the answer is terrorism. And who is dehumanizing whom. Is it the terrorists who are dehumanizing us or we who are refusing to view them as real people? And unless the Democrats can figure out an answer on foreign policy, then there is a chance they could blow it, despite all of what you said.
Yeah. Because clearly, the Republican foreign policy is working well for us, being mired in a quagmire of a war and alienating every single ally we’ve every had. Sorry, Mr. Fineman – the GOP imaginary boogie man of “terrorism” isn’t going to kill off the Democratic Party. Keep trying, though, it’s cute to watch the Republicans spin out.
It does suck that the GOP has fucked up the world and will then be handing it back to the Democrats in ’08 to pick up the pieces, but they couldn’t do worse the the Republicans.
Indiana Student Paper Censors Gay Tolerance
(via Advance Indiana) from the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette:
Woodlan editorial on gays ignites firestorm
Principal demands prior review, warns teacher
By Kelly Soderlund
The Journal Gazette
A student editorial in the Woodlan Junior-Senior High School newspaper calling for more tolerance for gays and lesbians sparked the principal to seek approval of each edition before it goes to print and issue a written warning against the journalism teacher.
About 10 students attended the East Allen County Schools board meeting Tuesday night to ask members whether the issue could be put on the next meeting’s agenda. Superintendent Kay Novotny denied their request and suggested they meet with Assistant Superintendent Andy Melin instead.
Sophomore Megan Chase wrote an opinion piece – her first for the newspaper – that appeared in the Jan. 19 issue of the Woodlan Tomahawk that questioned people who believe it’s wrong to be gay or lesbian. Chase said she wrote the piece after a friend disclosed to her he was gay.
“I can only imagine how hard it would be to come out as homosexual in today’s society,” Chase wrote. “I think it is so wrong to look down on those people, or to make fun of them, just because they have a different sexuality than you. There is nothing wrong with them or their brain; they’re just different than you.”
Principal Edwin Yoder wrote a letter to the newspaper staff and journalism teacher Amy Sorrell insisting he sign off on every issue. Sorrell and the students contacted the Student Press Law Center, an advocacy group for student newspapers, which advised them to appeal the decision.
Last week, Yoder issued Sorrell a written warning for insubordination and not carrying out her responsibilities as a teacher. He accused her of exposing Woodlan students, who are in grades seven through 12, to inappropriate material and said if she did not comply with his orders she could be fired.
Yoder would not comment for this story, but Melin, who said he hasn’t read the editorial, said school officials do not have an issue with the topic but with the lack of balance and thoroughness in the opinion piece. Sorrell also should have consulted with Yoder before the article was printed, Melin said.
Melin would not comment on any disciplinary actions taken against Sorrell.
The students also asked the EACS board to clarify its policy on tolerance of gays and lesbians, which it did not address. Melin said there is no policy and didn’t think the board should have to go as far as to write one. Melin said EACS has had a policy since 2003 that states principals have the authority to review each issue of a student publication before it goes to print. It’s up to the individual principal how he or she wants to enforce it, Melin said.
According to its Web site, the Journalism Education Association strongly opposes prior review.
Prior to the editorial being published, Melin said Yoder asked Sorrell to bring to him any stories she thought would be controversial. In fact, Sorrell brought Yoder a piece on teen pregnancy that appeared in the same edition.
“I didn’t think it was going to be an issue at all. I didn’t think anybody would be upset about it,” Sorrell said of the editorial on gays and lesbians. She wrote a rebuttal to Yoder’s warning and sent it to him and Novotny.
Melin cited the 1988 Supreme Court case, Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, which ruled St. Louis school officials had the authority to censor stories about teen pregnancy and divorce in its high school newspaper.
Adam Goldstein, attorney at the Student Press Law Center, said the Woodlan situation does not fall under the Supreme Court precedent, which permits a school to interfere with student expression only when it can provide a legitimate educational basis for doing so.
In the Hazelwood case, school officials were able to prove the articles went against what was being taught in the classroom.
“If students are not being taught tolerance in the classroom, their problem is much larger than this particular incident,” Goldstein said.
Yoder is practicing an illegal form of censorship, Goldstein said, and the Student Press Law Center has available attorneys who are willing to donate their time if the Woodlan students take the case to court.
Unbelievable — suggesting that gay and lesbian students shouldn’t be bullied and harassed is unacceptable in school? So that logically means the School Administration is in favor of gay and lesbian students being bullied and harassed?
Deleted… Indy Star’s Expresso Blog
… from my Feed Reader: The Indy Star’s Expresso blog. For taking up space in my brain that can better be used by something else.
Bill Maher Outs Ken Mehlman on CNN, and CNN censors on Pacific Broadcast
Bill Maher “outed” GOP party chairman Ken Mehlman as a gay man on Larry King Live last night — as seen on video here.
But on the rebroadcast for the west coast, they edited that bit out of the program, as seen here.
C’mon, guys. YouTube makes this sort of thing ridiculous. I can’t imagine why they’d bother editing that — it’s not like Larry King said it, Maher said it. If it’s not true, it’s not a reflection on CNN. And editing it out just gives it credence, and suggests that it’s something to be hidden.
UPDATES – The above links no longer show the videos of the Larry King show, as YouTube has asked the blog owner to take them down at the request of CNN. However, you can still see the whole video on the Huffington Post.
I think the cat’s out of the proverbial bag on this one, guys.
Journalist under criminal charges for filming Katrina evacuees
A journalist and a TV producer working on a piece about Katrina refugees have been charged with the crime of videotaping a “critical national security structure” in Louisiana… Palast Charged with Journalism in the First Degree:
On August 22, for LinkTV and Democracy Now! we videotaped the thousands of Katrina evacuees still held behind a barbed wire in a trailer park encampment a hundred miles from New Orleans. It’s been a year since the hurricane and 73,000 POW’s (Prisoners of W) are still in this aluminum ghetto in the middle of nowhere. One resident, Pamela Lewis said, “It is a prison set-up” — except there are no home furloughs for these inmates because they no longer have homes.
To give a sense of the full flavor and smell of the place, we wanted to show that this human parking lot, with kids and elderly, is nearly adjacent to the Exxon Oil refinery, the nation’s second largest, a chemical-belching behemoth.
So we filmed it. Without Big Brother’s authorization. Uh, oh. Apparently, the broadcast of these stinking smokestacks tipped off Osama that, if his assassins pose as poor Black folk, they can get a cramped Airstream right next to a “critical infrastructure” asset.
So now Matt and I have a “criminal complaint” lodged against us with the feds.
…
Dectective Pananepinto, in justifying our impending bust, said, “If you remember, a lot of people were killed on 9/11.”
Yes, Detective, I remember that very well: my office was in the World Trade Center. Lucky for me, I was out of town that day. It was not a lucky day for 3,000 others.
Yes, I remember “a lot” of people were killed. So I have this suggestion, Detective — and you can pass it on to Mr. Bush: Go and find the people who killed them.
Local News and Online Reporting
WTHR has this story on their website:
Study: Omega 3 can save lives
Experts say beefing up intake of Omega 3 fatty acids can save lives more than AED’s and implanted defibrillators. Omega 3 is found in foods like fish and nuts, and some experts believe they can lower the risk for heart attack because of their ability to reduce inflammation.
By using a computer simulation, experts measured how well AED’s, implanted heart defibrillators and Omega 3 nutrients prevented sudden death. They found raising the levels of Omega 3 fatty acids in people’s diets would prevent sudden death eight times more than widely distributing AED’s, and two times more than implanted defibrillators.
That’s fascinating, and I immediately wanted to know more. But you know what? I can’t find out any more than that from the WTHR, because the above is all the web page shows. The story is okay if they’re just reading it on the evening news (although they really should be identifying who the “experts” in the story are) but it’s not fine online, where they have plenty of space to round out the story with more information. They SHOULD link off to the study in question at the very least. Presumably they got the information somewhere. Tell us where it came from. I guess it’s a short trip to google to figure out more detail, but I shouldn’t have to do that.
I remember journalism classes from college where we had to take the same story and write it in 10 different ways – one to be broadcast on the news, one to be a front-page newspaper story, one to be a featured article in a magazine, etc. There were standard elements that had to appear in each format, and the stories had to be “trimmed” in different ways to fit the alloted column inches of space. I get the impression that journalists don’t do that anymore.
Cross-dresser doused with gasoline (?)
“Cross-dresser doused with gasoline” is a headline in today’s IndyStar. That’s the kind of headline that makes my heart stop. Fortunately, it didn’t have a tragic outcome. And the story itself seemed to have little to do with the person in question being a cross-dresser, so I wonder why it made a headline, other than the sensationalism of the idea of a person wearing the clothing of a different sex than their own.
I wonder if we’ll look back at news items like this with incredulousness 100 years from now — they way do today when reading news items from the recent past, regarding black people and women, that contained casually racist and sexist statements.
Quotes
“… because we watched a debate from the House of Representatives about the Iraq Resolution, and it did seem like – you ever been to Trafalgar Square, where they have the, uh, speaker’s corner where, like, crazy people get up on a box, and go, “Harrumph! And Roosevelt stole my couch!” You know, that kind of stuff? They seem like, like crazy people…
“People who get in involved in politics and run for office are the extremists and people on the fringe. Because regular, reasonable people have shit to do.” — Jon Stewart
RiShawn Biddle Doesn’t Know Anything About Blogs
I participated in a panel of bloggers this morning, addressing the PRSA (Public Relations Society of America, Hoosier Chapter) to talk about local blogs with public relations people. Here are my fellow panelists:
RiShawn Biddle, Editorial Writer, The IndyStar, and Expresso blog
Jennifer Wagner, Taking Down Words blog
Gary Welsh, Advance Indiana blog
Matt Tully, political news writer, and IndyStar blog
The Indy Star “bloggers” (I’m sorry, you can’t “blog” inside a newpaper, no matter what bandwagon you’re trying to get on) dominated a lot of the discussion and seemed a bit self-important about their status as “real” writers. That’s nice. I have a journalism degree, too, kids. I thought it was interesting that Matt Tully only has to write three articles a week. I should have stuck with that journalism thing, because that’s pretty slackerish to me. I have to write a lot more than that at my job, and I’m a designer for pete’s sake.
Of the five panelists, I’m the only person who has a technical background and did all the set up for my own blog. I’ve met Gary Welsh before and read his writing every day, and I read Jennifer Wagner’s blog every day also. Both of them cover political issues and are fascinating to read — they know way more about politics than I do and I learn a hell of a lot about what’s going on locally from both of them.
When it comes to RiShawn Biddle, I think the “doesn’t know anything about blogs” is pretty fair of me. What tells me this is the list of “big national bloggers” he threw out — who he thinks the major league players are. His was a pretty comical list — he mentioned “Instapundit” three times, and someone from a news site twice. I know that Instapundit falls into the top list of unique links, but that’s not the only measure of “big.” I factor “awareness of new media trends” and “tech saavy” into the the mix, which means they not only have a large audience currently, but will adjust with the changes when the “blogosphere” morphs into something quite a bit different, which it’s currently poised to do. He also threw out Movable Type as the hot new blog technology for savvy bloggers. I have this site on Movable Type, but it’s about 3 years out of date as the hot technology. I’m looking at coding my own content management software in Django right now.
Here are some actual “A-List” national bloggers according to me, but with some backup from Technorati:
Boing Boing
Avalonstar
Jason Santa Maria
Engadget
kottke.org
Subtraction
Signal vs. Noise
Creating Passionate Users
Daily Kos
Also, I don’t know if Rishawn knows a lot about education. Not that I do either, but his example of educational shortcomings was pretty off. He mentioned that in his blog he covered an issue about the fact that the standard “passing level” for the driving test is higher than the standard “passing level” for the ISTEP — and how wrong that seems to him. This is a really dumb example about education for a couple of reasons — one being that you’re comparing apples to oranges. For one thing, the driving test is way more important, so the standards for it should be higher — it keeps people from killing me with their cars. And for another, the driving test is an accurate measure of people’s rote memorization of the driving rules they’ll be applying on the road. But the ISTEP isn’t in any way an accurate measure of what students have learned in school. Students learn way more than the ISTEP really measures, and part of the reason they’re “failing” the ISTEP is because it isn’t asking the right questions. ISTEP is a poor yardstick with which to measure education, so it doesn’t matter that the “passing level” is low. Comparing a test we need that helps keep us safe with a test that is irrelevant and needs to be thrown away is silly.