From Frank Rich’s Last Call for Change We Can Believe In: “What Obama…should have learned by now is that the press is not his friend. Of course, he gets more ink and airtime than McCain; he’s sexier news. But as George Mason University’s Center for Media and Public Affairs documented in its study of six weeks of TV news reports this summer, Obama’s coverage was 28 percent positive, 72 percent negative. (For McCain, the split was 43/57.)”
From ASSHE’s Interview Series: Jesse Pyles, Service-Learning & Sustainability Coordinator at Green Mountain College: “In this second installment of the AASHE Interview Series we have the opportunity to hear from Jesse Pyles, the Service-Learning & Sustainability Coordinator at Green Mountain College.” [FYI: You all have seen Jesse making comments on Fluid Imagination, but if you don't live in Poultney, you probably don't know Jesse personally. Check out this interview to see how a member of the Fluid Imagination community spends his days].
From the Progressive’s One Teacher’s Cry: Why I Hate No Child Left Behind: “No Child Left Behind is a symptom of a larger problem: the attack on public education itself. Like the school choice effort, which uses public funds to finance private schools and cherry-pick the best students, No Child Left Behind is designed to punish public schools and to demonstrate that private is best. But I don’t think we’ve turned a corner that we can’t come back from. Public education has been a dynamic vehicle in our country since its inception. We must grapple with maintaining this progressive institution. Policymakers and educators know that education holds out hope as the great equalizer in this country. It can inspire and propel a student, a family, a community.”
In case you’re watching the video and not catching it, Sen. McCain is saying that he’d have nominated Cheney as his vice-president in 2000. He’s also saying that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell are the strongest national security team we’ve ever had.
And this is not a knee-jerk supporting-the-president-in-the-wake-of-9/11 thing. McCain is saying this in January of 2001.
Which is basically a way of saying that, if McCain had been elected in 2000 and not President Bush, the foreign policy of the United States would still be much the same as it is today.
From Boston.com’s The myth of the white minority: “For generations, ‘whites’ have been hearing that they are about to be engulfed by unassimilable foreign races, and for centuries those ‘races’ have eventually become - white! Benjamin Franklin worried mightily about the threat posed to white American culture by the influx of German immigrants. ‘Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens,’ he demanded in 1751, ‘who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them?’ Those ’swarthy’ Germans, Franklin was quite sure, ‘will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can adopt our Complexion.’” [Hat tip to Adam for the link]
From NY Times Magazine’s Barack Obama, A Free-Market-Loving, Big-Spending, Fiscally Conservative Wealth Redistributionist: “‘My core economic theory is pragmatism,’ [Obama] said, ‘figuring out what works.’ This, of course, is not the whole story. Invoking pragmatism doesn’t help the average voter much; ideology, though it often gets a bad name, matters, because it offers insight into how a candidate might actually behave as president. I have spent much of this year trying to get a handle on what is sometimes called Obamanomics and have come away thinking that Obama does have an economic ideology. It’s just not a completely familiar one. Depending on how you look at it, he is both more left-wing and more right-wing than many people realize.”
According to Finn’s dad, he’s a big fan of Jonny Lang. If you haven’t heard of Jonny Lang, he’s like the less-talented love-child of Jeff Buckley and Derek Trucks. He’s not bad, but he’s not crazy good like Buckley or Trucks.
But here’s my question to you. If you were to recommend music to a 14-month old little boy who enjoys a musical blend of soul, blues, and Southern rock, what musicians/albums would you recommend?
From Frank Rich’s The Candidate We Still Don’t Know: “So why isn’t Obama romping? The obvious answer — and both the excessively genteel Obama campaign and a too-compliant press bear responsibility for it — is that the public doesn’t know who on earth John McCain is. The most revealing poll this month by far is the Pew Research Center survey finding that 48 percent of Americans feel they’re ‘hearing too much’ about Obama. Pew found that only 26 percent feel that way about McCain, and that nearly 4 in 10 Americans feel they hear too little about him. It’s past time for that pressing educational need to be met.”
From NY Times’s Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America?: “When Americans were asked in a 2007 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press to name the journalist they most admired, Mr. Stewart, the fake news anchor, came in at No. 4, tied with the real news anchors Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw of NBC, Dan Rather of CBS and Anderson Cooper of CNN. And a study this year from the center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded that ‘ ‘The Daily Show’ is clearly impacting American dialogue’ and ‘getting people to think critically about the public square.’”
From Rolling Stone’s Candidates for Sale: “The truth is that the campaigns of both Barack Obama and John McCain are being inundated with cash from more or less exactly the same gorgons of the corporate scene. From Wall Street to the Big Oil powerhouses to the military-industrial complex, America’s fat-cat business leaders know that the Animal House-style party of the last eight years that made almost all of them…is about to come to an end, and someone is going to have to pay to clean up the mess. They want that someone to be you, not them, and they’ve spared no expense to make sure both presidential candidates will be there to bail them out next year. [And] they’re succeeding. Both would-be presidents have already sold us out.” [Hat tip to Adam for the link]
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