Jerry--
Your comment looks and sounds like something that someone who is media
ignorant would write.
I hear the NYT impugned all the time. I read it thorougly, but I also read
Wall Street Journal (whose editorial page controlled by it's conservative
publisher Mr. Kahn is vastly different from it's excellent articles); I read
Investor's Business Daily for it's two IT pages every day that help me
context the industry, software, hdw, companies and innovations, but it's
editorial page has been it's own Jon Stewart satire on sophisticated
business editors.
IBDs editorial page is out of touch with reality on the ground in Iraq, in
Afganistan, as to the health care system that has forbidden competitive
bidding for medicare drugs that an older population is going to need more
than a younger one, as to science when cures for disease via embryonic stems
are foreclosed, when evolution is denied (grab a dog's paw and look at that
hand--on X-Ray it has the same metacarples as your hand--that wasn't the
fiction of intelligent design-- but I don't know how often you bark during
the day.) But IBD helps you follow the IT industry as do countless web
ezines.
I believe the resources and talent of the NY Times warrant your reading it
and I have encouraged people I know to begin following it at an early age.
If you don't like parts of it, I encourage you to at least follow the
www.nytimes.com/tech and
www.nytimes.com/circuit deals.
Their foreign pages on other countries are staffed by Ph.Ds and most of the
time they have spent significant time in the countries where the article is
focused.
I picked up one the other day in the newstand of an office building full of
lawyers and investment types and a guy walked up to me and said "Man you're
not really gonna read that trash--did you know 'conservative literature and
books are increasing' and 'liberal junk is dying out.' I grinned and said
"Did you know that there are regular edcitorial page writers Bill Safire
(although his columns are less frequent) who has turned further to the right
since '911' and David Brooks who is one of the best known and most talented
and very conservative writers world wide (who also writes excellent travel
and social context books that aren't political). He didn't know that about
David Brooks and his response was "Yeah people like that effiin David
Brooks --he's terrible" -I think the word he used I've heard before and it
is used often in different contexts as a noun, a verb, an adverb, and as an
adjective.
I wasn't surprised at the word. It gets used more frequenlty now by all
sexes, on all socioeconomic levels and it's a rite of passage for kids at an
early age testing their vocabulary skills.
I wasn't surprised at the ignorance of who David Brooks, a leading
conservative writer was by this self professed hater of the NYT either. For
comic relief I'll randomly click on Fox News and the Fox commentators and
there are numerous sites that compare Rush Limbaugh's delusional convoluted
thinking with the facts on the ground. I recently saw clips of Limbaugh
mocking a Parkinson's patient named Michale J. Fox saying he had "gone off
his medication" in order to exaggerate his disease symptoms for political
gain. His commercial ran originally for Senator Claire McCaskill. What
anyone with an IQ of 3 saw in Michale J. Fox were what physicians call EPS's
(extra pyramidal symptoms)or side effects of anti-Parkinsonian drugs that
are well known and have their routes in neuropharmacology and
neurophysiology.
When I heard Limbaugh stupidly say that, waving his plump arms around, I
had a nanosecond flash of memory that the closest Limbaugh has gotten to
medical knowledge is when as an addict he sociopathatically doc shopped to
get his voluminous stash of opiate prescriptions filled, using domestic help
that worked for him to score scripts as well.
I also watched with amusement as Limbaugh who is a multimillion dollar
franchise who plays on the ignorance and lack of sophistication of his
audience, worked a sweet heart deal with the DA in Florida through attorney
Roy Black and noted the contrast in the people Rush wants behind bars who
commit lesser crimes, and how Rush bought his way out of prison because he
had the money in a justice system that isn't blind to it at all in the U.S.
Many people who did what Rush did are processed into federal prison in the
US every day.
Senator Richard Shelby (Republican, Alabama) knows this dynamic well because
his son and his physician wife's son, was caught with a considerable amount
of hashish to be dealt on the streets in an airport and the feds backed
their azz up and the case was dismissed in a state court. The media was
waved off the story but they picked up on it superficially.
The U.S. Sentencing Guidelines provide that 1 gram of hashish is the
equivalent of 5 grams of marijuana and that 1 gram of marijuana is two
doses. Claude Shelby could have served a long prison sentence had he been
anyone else.
The senator may find it hard to be stoic if his drug_fighting colleagues in
the House have their way," said Monica Pratt, communications director for
Families Against Mandatory Minimums, in an op_ed in the Atlanta
Constitution. Pratt was referring to the "Drug Importer Death Penalty Act"
(HR 41), introduced by House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R_GA), which would
mandate a life sentence without parole for offenders who import "
You can listen to Rush make it up, or you can listen to and read Norm
Ornstein
The Broken Branch
www.amazon.com/Broken-Branch-Institutions-American-Democracy/dp/0195174461
You can believe that Congress has been exercising independent oversight of
this "war" the way they did during Truman's Presidency or you can understand
that people like Pat Roberts, soon to be ex Chairman of the Senate Select
Intelligence Committee (Harry Reid will remove him very soon and Bill Frist
is effectively no longer majority leader now) have done every possible
thing to obstruct uncovering fraud and screwups, you rights to privacy, or
hearings on to exactly the fraud that pretended bad intelligence had
Congress supportive of the fiasco in Iraq.
So Jerry P. , cast some pearls for all of us uneducated, unwashed peasants
as to what the Jerry Reading list that has made you such an accomplished
news afficianado and tell me what you regard as quality journalism. I have
lots of learning curves, and I'm sure I could improve the quality of the
papers, blogs, and ezines I try to get to when there is time.
CH
