Agonist editor Sean-Paul Kelley has organized a campaign to pressure the National Press Club into adding John Aravosis, the blogger most responsible for breaking the story of Jeff Gannon/Jim Guckert’s inexplicable two-year run of daily White House press passes, to a Press Club panel discussion featuring Gannon/Guckert as the totem for the question, “Who is […]

It isn’t as though Tom DeLay has made a secret of his belief that his job in Congress is to promote a biblical worldview, or as though Bill Frist and Rick Santorum and other GOP senators have tried to disguise their assaults on secular America, or as though anyone to the left of those people failed to recognize that the party has adopted thuggery and bile, cloaked in Christianity, as its principal tools of persuasion.

Salant says he hopes Guckert will be asked how he got the passes for so long and why the White House considered him to be a journalist, the answers to which will be “I just asked for them” and “I am a journalist,” which seems to me to offer a less than compelling reason for inviting him to the panel.

The obvious explanation for Guckert’s presence on the panel is the NPC’s desire to exploit the notoriety surrounding his departure from the press room—to pimp him for fun and profit, in other words—but I could be wrong. Maybe he’s there as an example of journalism so degraded that it approaches the level of blogging.

So the guy has a copy editor and three others to protect him from himself. Most self-respecting bloggers get by with a spell-checker, Google and common sense, but Shaw needs a fifth editor to guard against unintentional self-parody.

The April issue of Scientific American offers a must-read editorial (link is to an abstract with purchase option). It should be tattooed on the forearms of every working journalist.
In retrospect, this magazine’s coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin […]

Stepping into chilly water is a shock but you get used to it; when it’s freezing, you just go numb.

The Republicans may think that the Schiavo case, and ones like it, are smart politics. But if they do, they’re fooling themselves. Kohut’s NYT piece (via EDM) suggests that the religious right is now approaching the same status as the NRA, i.e. it can win political fights even though they defy political opinion. The basic […]

Friedman’s friends and family members are said to be overjoyed. A spokesman for the family, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the last reported sighting of Friedman had been late in 2002 when he was seen fleeing barefoot from Karl Rove’s office pursued by a pack of flying monkeys.

Condoleezza Rice is getting off to a strong start in the 2008 campaign season.
A number of the blogs linked above cite California Democrat Dianne Feinstein’s introduction of Rice to the Senate foreign relations committee, particularly this excerpt:
The problems we face abroad are complex and sizable. If Dr. Rice’s past performance is any indication, though, […]