Politics

Obama's Speech to Schools No Reason to Freak Out

The lead story in today's St. Augustine Record feeds the hysteria over President Obama's planned speech to the nation's schoolchildren Tuesday. "Parents may pull kids from Obama talk," the headline reads, "Some St. Johns parents fear political message." Instead of covering what Obama's going to say to students, which will be a non-partisan call for kids to study, do homework and help the country by bettering themselves educationally, the Record leads with idiotic spin from Florida Republican ... (read more)

2009/09/05

Texan's Ad: 'You Will Never Silence Me'

While stopping in Liberty City, Texas, recently to eat at the binding arbitration Whataburger restaurant, I found an interesting display ad in the Longview News-Journal. The ad, which was almost a half-page in size, read as follows: Amos Snow, III Longview, TX 75605 Apparently, I'm an enemy of the State. I'm a Navy veteran, who for 7 years served my country in the forgotten conflicts of the '80s. I'm a small business owner who provides jobs within the community and provides finished goods to ... (read more)

2009/08/11

Daily Kos Shoots Down Anti-Gun Control Diary

I skim through 50-100 stories a day published on Daily Kos as I consider items for Watching the Watchers. To minimize bandwidth use, a Java application that I wrote saves a cached copy of each story on my server. Because of this cache, I end up seeing stories that were deleted from the site. I'd heard for years that a lot of user-submitted stories are deleted from Daily Kos because of the viewpoints they espouse. So far, I'm not finding that to be the case. I've seen around 30 stories that were ... (read more)

2009/07/20

Anderson Cooper: 'I Don't Know Anything About Sports'

As the media grappled with Sarah Palin's explanation that she quit the Alaska governor's office because she's not a quitter, CNN host Anderson Cooper had a hilarious exchange with Palin spokeswoman Meg Stapleton. Stapleton tried to use Palin's analogy that in basketball, a good point guard passes the ball and runs off the court in the middle of the game, never to return. The analogy was completely lost on Cooper, for reasons he makes apparent: Anderson Cooper: You say this is leadership, but ... (read more)

2009/07/06

Watching the Watchers Makes Use of Creative Commons

I've completed the second phase of the Watching the Watchers relaunch, which I began in late May. The site has become a digest of interesting news and commentary from sites that permit redistribution. As you can see, the traffic graph's become a lot more fun to look at lately. The site now includes stories that were published under a Creative Commons license that permits reuse. If you're unfamiliar with Creative Commons, it's a popular way to allow your copyrighted work -- whether it's text, ... (read more)

2009/07/02

Sarah Palin Violates the U.S. Flag Code

The August 2009 issue of Runner's World includes a Q&A with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin about her lifelong interest in jogging. The interview reveals that she took an unreported fall while running with the Secret Service before the vice presidential debate and describes how Sen. John McCain loves being up a creek: I used to joke around with John McCain during the campaign about coming jogging with me. And once I asked him what his favorite exercise was, and he said, 'I go wading.' Wading. He lives ... (read more)

2009/06/30

Relaunching Watching the Watchers

I recently relaunched Watching the Watchers as an Utne Reader-style digest of interesting political news and commentary published on sites that permit redistribution. In the first phase, most of the content is coming from Daily Kos, which has the following license: Site content may be used for any purpose without explicit permission unless otherwise specified. Hundreds of diary entries roll through Daily Kos every day, and a lot of interesting stuff falls through the cracks. I only consider Kos ... (read more)

2009/06/16

Andrew Sullivan, Iran News Sites Under Denial of Service Attack

The political weblogger Andrew Sullivan, who has been covering the protests in Iran around the clock for several days, reported early Monday that his site appears to be suffering a denial of service (DOS) attack intended to knock it offline: The Atlantic magazine is struggling to keep the site up despite what seems to be a digital attack. Please be persistent in trying to reload. Sullivan's site, which has been passing along updates from the election protests in both English and Farsi, has been ... (read more)

2009/06/15

Conservative Blogs Doing Better Under Obama

Blogger Simon Owens is tracking the traffic of the 20 largest liberal and conservative blogs to see how they've fared since the election. The blogs have collectively dropped 109 million unique visitors from October 2008 to May 2009: Right of center blogs weathered the post-election season a little better, falling only 37%, while blogs that were left-of-center fell by 64%. Some blogs did better than others. Instapundit, for instance, was the only blog to show a slight increase in page views ... (read more)

2009/06/14

Andrew Breitbart's Mad About Hollywood (Or Just Mad)

Andrew Breitbart's a right-wing journalist in Los Angeles who coauthored the Drudge Report for years without getting any credit. He now runs Breitbart.Com and Big Hollywood and writes columns for the Washington Times. Breitbart.Com, which consists primarily of wire content, receives 1.7 million unique visitors a month, an audience he built by linking to the site frequently while working for Drudge. All external indicators would suggest that Breitbart has a lot to be happy about, but I've ... (read more)

2009/06/12

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