Politics

The Washington Media are a Joke

After declaring that he is well-known for being funny, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen launches a weird snit today against Stephen Colbert for his speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner: Colbert was not just a failure as a comedian but rude. Rude is not the same as brash. It is not the same as brassy. It is not the same as gutsy or thinking outside the box. Rudeness means taking advantage of the other person's sense of decorum or tradition or civility that keeps that other ... (read more)

2006/05/04

Remembering Brian Buck

A comment spam showed up today in a year-old Workbench entry marking the death of Brian Buck, a blogger who told the story of his five-year fight with cancer to its end last April. The entry about Buck was the last before I created an international incident by popesquatting Benedict XVI. So in a nice bit of serendipity, thousands of people drawn here by international press coverage read about Buck, a remarkable person whose blog stands testament to the power of personal journalism. In a ... (read more)

2006/04/14

Web Publishers Take Gamble with Casino Ads

I wrote an article for Wired News today about efforts by the U.S. government to go after web publishers who run gambling ads. One of the biggest losers is Sporting News, the media company owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. In January, the company surrendered $4.2 million in revenue to avoid prosecution for advertising gambling sites between 2000 and 2003 in its magazine, as well as on its website and syndicated radio network. Tune in Sporting News Radio today and you'll hear the other ... (read more)

2006/04/14

Next Outsourced Job: Fast Food Order Taker

McDonald's has begun outsourcing drive-through orders in 40 of its restaurants, using 125 workers at a call center in California and submitting orders back over the Internet. The process saves "seconds" on each order. Workers make $6.75 an hour, get no health benefits and handle up to 95 orders an hour in a job that sounds like a workplace massacre in the making: Ms. Vargas seems unfazed by her job, even though it involves being subjected to constant electronic scrutiny. Software tracks her ... (read more)

2006/04/11

Anna Badkhen's coverage of the East African drought has taken her from Kenya to Somalia, where she filed a report marking 15 years of anarchy and the shooting of a local radio journalist as he traveled to a seminar. The topic of the event: "reducing violence in Somalia." ... (read more)

2006/04/07

Who Keeps the Metric System Down?

In a Washington Post remembrance of the late Reagan Press Secretary Lyn Nofziger, longtime friend and political rival Frank Mankiewicz claims that they worked secretly to kill the metric system in the United States: ... during that first year of Reagan's presidency, I sent Lyn another copy of a column I had written a few years before, attacking and satirizing the attempt by some organized do-gooders to inflict the metric system on Americans, a view of mine Lyn had enthusiastically endorsed. So, ... (read more)

2006/03/29

Humility Equals History Plus Time

An e-mail received by the Drudge Retort: How long did it take for your Jewish handlers to force you to remove the Charlie Sheen/9-11 story the other day? A comment on Workbench: Two people witness an event (Jews and Palestinians) and you decide that Jews are simply not credible. You don't want credible, you want to continue to be a racist, Jew hating, angry young man. When I was young, I can recall studying some of the more horrific moments in history and thinking myself fortunate to live in ... (read more)

2006/03/28

Give Justice Scalia a Hand

When Justice Antonin Scalia received little consideration for promotion to Chief Justice, I wondered how well he'd take life as a second banana to John Roberts. Recent events suggest he isn't handling it well. After making public remarks about Gitmo detentions that could force his recusal from an upcoming case, Scalia left a Catholic mass Sunday and made an obscene Sicilian gesture to a reporter. As he was leaving the mass, Scalia was tossed a softball question by a Boston Herald reporter about ... (read more)

2006/03/28

East Africa Suffers Worst Famine in Decades

I've written before about the journalist Anna Badkhen, who filed incredible reports from Iraq for the San Francisco Chronicle on the day-to-day lives of soldiers and Iraqis. She's now in Kenya, covering a drought across East Africa that has left millions of people dependent on food aid that's running out: Now Isaaq's family -- her husband, Nur Muhammad, and their children, ranging in ages from 1 to 10 -- have no livestock to sell, and nothing of their own to eat or drink. They left the bush and ... (read more)

2006/03/26

Rachel Corrie: The Show Must Go Away

The current issue of The Nation has a great cover story on My Name is Rachel Corrie, a play created from the e-mail and journal entries of the American activist killed in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer in March 2003. The play was supposed to begin yesterday at the New York Theatre Workshop off-Broadway, but it has been postponed indefinitely because the theater chickened out. Here's artistic director James Nicola's explanation: In our pre-production planning and our talking around and listening ... (read more)

2006/03/23

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