Another excellent offering from The Full Ginsburg.

BTW I love the term "full Ginsburg," which means appearing on all five Sunday News programs on one day, named after William H. Ginsburg...Monica Lewinsky's lawyer. Cool trivia.

Open thread below.

[image from The Museum of Pop Culture blog] With lots of "concerned" folk turning from The New York Times Book Review to worry about the NEA report on the continued demise of reading, I have two questions:

1. What are C&L readers (oh there's that word again) reading these days, or planning to read in the coming year?
2. Do Spiderman Trivia Pringles Potato Chips count?

And it's an open thread, too, so if you're totally anti-reading you can just write something instead...

When a high-profile Republican runs into serious trouble, as Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) clearly has, he or she inevitably turns to a few reliable rejoinders that are supposed to help make things better. The first is “9/11 changed everything.” That probably won’t work in this case. The second is “Tempest in a teapot.” When an anti-gay senator pleads guilty to pursuing gay sex in an airport men’s room, dismissing it as trivia is a stretch.

And third is, “It’s the media’s fault.” This, apparently, is the new excuse d’jour.

[Craig] blamed the Idaho Statesman of Boise for his legal and political troubles stemming from his arrest in a sex-related matter at an airport men’s room in Minnesota in June.

He denounced the longstanding probes by the Statesman — he called it a “witch hunt” — for inspiring him to plead guilty to the offense even though he said he was actually innocent. He said he had been “viciously harassed” by the newspaper. “I am not gay,” he said twice. “I love my wife.”

Now, I can appreciate Craig’s desperation, which is probably clouding his judgment, but blaming the Idaho Statesman is transparently ridiculous. First, the paper hadn’t even published any stories about Craig’s homosexuality until after he was arrested, so it’s not as if news accounts led to undue pressure. And second, by the senator’s logic, the newspaper’s interest in his personal life caused him to plead guilty to a crime he didn’t commit.

I’m afraid Craig is going to need a more coherent defense.

Petrelis Files: The latest issue of the New York Review of Books has a must-read report from Baghdad by UC Berkeley journalism dean Orville Schell on the state of the press in the Iraqi city.

Speak Speak News: The FBI investigates the president of Common Cause...for criticizing the Patriot Act at a meeting of the League of Women Voters.

The Satirical Political Report: On the heels of the Cheney “Downtime Requirements” document obtained by The Smoking Gun, this reporter has come into possession of a top secret memo outlining the Top Ten demands that President Bush has during his hotel stays...

The Reaction: The White House, which faces nothing but bad news on a daily basis, must be quite happy that the NY Times chooses to type up insipid trivia about possible staff changes rather than focus on the stunning incompetence of BUSHCO.

Night Bird's Fountain: Lizzy has a list of some of the women running for Congress as Democrats.

Check out Cliff Schecter's weekly column over at AMERICAblog

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: The Reaction: The White House, which faces nothing but bad news on a daily basis, must be quite happy that the NY Times chooses to type up insipid trivia about possible staff changes rather than focus on the stunning incompetence of BUSHCO.

Night Bird's Fountain: Lizzy has a list of some of the women running for Congress as Democrats.

Check out Cliff Schecter's weekly column over at AMERICAblog

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: earth family alpha...The WitList...Politics in the Zeros...Political Theory Daily Review...The Swift Report
earth family alpha...The WitList...Politics in the Zeros...Political Theory Daily Review...The Swift Report

The Black Hole where the press used to be

via Driftglass :

How bad is it? Well, what do you think future generations will make of the fact that with little more than publicly available video clips and clever writing, John Stewart makes better ratings and tell more pure truth in any given four minutes of what is clearly labeled "Fake News" than the Empires of Mainstream Media can manage with a multi-billion dollar budget, a global infrastructure, and a 100,000 Klieg lights, satellites and pairs of hands?

There is nothing in modern history short of the collapse of the Soviet Union with which I can compare it for the scope and speed at which the implosion came, and in the great halls and palaces of Big Media we are left only with trivia and circuses. They have fallen, and they are never coming back....

Would that there was a Free Press who would report it?

via WWDT

...You know a television show is on its last legs when it adds a cute child actor in a last ditch attempt at ratings. It happened to "The Brady Bunch." It happened to "All in the Family." It happened to "Different Strokes," "The Cosby Show" and "Family Ties."

And now it's happening to President Bush's travelling road show for Social Security reform (or, as Josh Marshall likes to call it, "Bamboozlepalooza").

The NY Times reports that nine-year-old Noah McCullough of Tonight Show presidential trivia fame has agreed to join the President and entourage in stumping for privatization. He will travel in advance of presidential visits to soften radio and public audiences with his command of presidential trivia, his youthful charm and his faith in Bush's plan.

Tbogg reminds us that Dennis Prager once claimed that the "politicization of children" was a symptom of the liberal disease.

Of course, as moralists, we must consider not only the means taken but the end for the sake of which it was taken. read on