Poor Richard's Anorak

The Washington Monthly

Link: The Washington Monthly.

We get more fake news videos, but this time from California. Thanks to Kevin Drum for the link.

MSNBC - Selling a war (honestly)

Link: MSNBC - Selling a war (honestly) .

Again, Eric Alterman writes about what a lot of reporters are afraid to cover.

Think Again: Iran-Contra, the Sequel?-Center for American Progress

Link:
Think Again: Iran-Contra, the Sequel?
-
Center for American Progress.

The recent announcement that John Negroponte was the president’s nominee to be the nation’s first national intelligence director (NID) was treated as major news, but the current ambassador to Iraq’s past record was visited upon by reporters with only the most cursory examination. Although the duties of the NID have yet to be fully fleshed out, the one thing we do know is that Negroponte will oversee a combustible mix of 15 agencies (including the CIA). What power the position actually entails (or even where his office is) is yet to be discovered.

Thanks to Eric Alterman for wriing about things that so many journalists are afraid to write about.

ChoicePoint Execs Sold Shares After Breach - EarthLink - Business News

Link: ChoicePoint Execs Sold Shares After Breach - EarthLink - Business News.

ChoicePoint Inc.'s top two executives made a combined $16.6 million in profit from selling company shares in the months after the data warehouser learned that people's personal information may have been compromised and before the breach was made public, regulatory filings show.

[via Earthlink Business News]

Blogging's Cure for the Expat Blues

Link: Blogging's Cure for the Expat Blues.

If Phineas Fogg had been a blogger would he have had such adventures?

Columns: Modern media need to show a little more courage

Link: Columns: Modern media need to show a little more courage.

I am delighted to see Eric Deggans writing so strongly about the lack of courage being demonstrated by most of the major media lately. I agree with him totally about the showing of the PBS program. I turned on my TV to watch Kurt Masur on Charlie Rose and I was delighted to see Buster. Ok, I thought. It's good they are showing it. It must be a repeat from the one in the afternoon. Then I realized that not only had it not been shown in the afternoon, but The Charlie Rose Show had been pre-empted to show it.

It seems that if there is ever a program that gets bumped it is a program with intelligent conversation, such as Tampa Bay Week or Charlie Rose. But at least they were showing the program which had been shouted down on so many of the PBS stations across the nation. The producer did an excellent job of responding to criticism of the show in the discussion program which followed.

The real point in Mr. Deggans excellent article is:
It's a lesson that comes from most American civil rights movements: Appeasing bigots never works. Challenging them brings real change..

Hear! Hear!

ArtsJournal: Sandow--Hilton Kramer and his attack on the poor, harmless gates

Link:
Greg rebuts the Kramer article:

And then the gates are alive. They catch the sunlight, if there is any, and they flap and billow in the wind. If there's enough wind, you hear the flapping. And the wind patterns surprised me. At one point, I saw a row of gates ahead of me flapping lustily, when all the other gates around them were hardly moving. The gates bring the winds of Central Park alive; they make visible something that's always there, but that before now there wasn't any way for anyone to see. ("Visible" isn't quite strong enough; they make the wind almost physically tangible.)

ANONYMOSES on Frank Luntz

Link: ANONYMOSES.

During the vote count in 2000, MSNBC hired Enron's Frank Luntz to hold town meetings to "gauge" public opinion. Yeah, right! Gauge! You mean sway, don't you?

WorkingForChange-The $200 million disinformation campaign

Link: WorkingForChange-The $200 million disinformation campaign.

The $200 million disinformation campaign
Social Security privatization cabal will break the bank to convince you to break yourself

We love Molly Ivins!

Blog de León

Link: Blog de León.

The moral of the story is that everybody who lives in Florida has a shared liability, and the anti-tax crowd in Jacksonville shouldn't complain about sharing the cost of this summer's hurricanes.

This blog is turning out to be one of the best Florida historical sources around.