Here in the reality-based world, its tough to imagine the situation on the ground in Iraq and how the president’s new “way forward” could possibly be any more effective than the past four years of “staying the course.”
Fortunately, a few high-ranking defense officials and pundits recently provided us with better context for understanding the road [...]

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The last turkey sandwiches have been choked down, and Christmas is all around. Snow on the ground, holiday music in the air, mistletoe-flavored coffee at Starbucks … and neighbors at each other’s throats. Break out the eggnogg!
Woman faces fines for wreath peace sign
Some neighbors in Colorado are up in arms over one resident’s [...]

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The George Allen versus Jim Webb Senate race in Virginia is as close and dirty as they come. The up-side is that Republican Allen’s bungles— his “macaca” references, his quoting Webb’s war novels out of context, his hired goons beating up bloggers— have generated some hilarious Web material, like this old crackup at ridiculopathy.com and [...]

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(via Boing Boing) Chirag Mehta created a tag cloud (like the one for our site below right) that illustrates the words presidents use in their speeches as a way to measure which issues the presidents deemed important (or which issues they thought would win them the most support).
Not surprisingly, words like “crime” “deficit” and [...]

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Multiple Choice Question: When did VH1 start giving a shit about hip-hop?
a) VH1 was down from the start when it played Public Enemy videos in the late 80s/early 90s to give the burgeoning counterculture movement exposure.
b) VH1 still never started and still doesn’t give a shit about hip-hop, but it does love the money and [...]

Read pop goes the rap reality/the white rapper experience »

A few days ago I blogged about how “NBC 2.0” restructuring plans were merely faux 2.0. Well it seems everyone is talking about 2.0 these day: what it is, what it is not, and whether it is becoming the platform for the short-term future of greedy people.
Legal scholar, creative commons founder, and all-around free internet [...]

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Salon’s video blog offers a gem today: a Republican National Committee ad that ran on CNN this weekend, featuring no candidate positions, no policy info, no attack on rival candidates, nothing but grainy footage of Osama and other men in Arab garb doing “scary” things that look like maybe combat training or parody martial arts [...]

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There wasn’t a parental warning on the site. I didn’t have to fork over my credit card number or proof of age. And yet I’m freely paging through images of hundreds of pouty women clad in the most outlandish of role-playing fetish gear. There oughta be a law … against the superskanky women’s costumes at [...]

Read Happy “Dress-Like-A-Ho” Day! »

Poor Pope Benedict XVI. Like Sammy Hagar to David Lee Roth, he’s having a hell of a time living up to his superpopular predecessor. Pope John Paul II got his own comic books, a flash Popemobile, and calls for canonization. Pope Benedict got the keys to the Vatican and some poorly-made flaming effigies.
Now, Pope John [...]

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We all know that politics is increasingly driven by public relations campaigns and that Bush and his administration are masters of spin. Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber’s recently released book “The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies and the Mess in Iraq” argues that America has been defeated by its own PR machine—a phenomenon [...]

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Whatever you think of Hugo Chavez and his Bush is Satin speech yesterday to the UN General Assembly, he may be inadvertently sabotaging the American Left by aligning himself with them. Waving a copy of Noam Chomsky’s book Hegemony or Survival: The Imperialist Strategy of the United States, Chavez said “It’s an excellent [...]

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It is no wonder this guy wore a “Bullshit Protector” over his ear during the president’s address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars this week. We’re going to need a lot more of these things.
In the run up to the first Gulf War, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl identified only as Nayirah provided tearful testimony before [...]

Read spinning Iraq, again and again »

The Washington Post reported today that the FCC has FINALLY launched an investigation into broadcasters who air unattributed video news releases as straight news. The investigation was prompted by Center for Media and Democracy study released in April that found that 77 stations had aired without proper labeling video news releases (or what the center [...]

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Last week, Charles Johnson from the Little Green Footballs blog site, exposed a Reuters photo depicting clouds of smoke over buildings in Beirut as being altered. The photo, taken by photographer Adnan Hajj, who worked for Reuters since the early 90s, used the Photoshop clone tool to reproduce smoke, making the image seem more intense [...]

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