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News, Spin

Nomenclature? Fine, thanks. You?

The reportage dichotomy keeps coming up. Who’s in charge: the people in the article or the people creating the article? How about a few terse examples, with questions we can consider over lunch. As noted yesterday, a school stopped what it called a gang initiation. In it local officials again say real gangs — just […]

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News, Spin

Thumb

It’s another skirmish between Israel and the Palestinians: “EILAT, Israel (AP) — A Palestinian suicide bomber killed three Israelis at a bakery Monday in the first such attack inside the country in nine months, and the two radical groups that claimed to have sent him said they were trying to end weeks of Palestinian infighting […]

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News, Spin

Cast bread upon the voters

It’s not fair to blow up a quotation of a state legislator, even adding context to show that he or she probably did mean it the way it sounded. But when remarks fall into your lap, courtesy of alert journalists, who can resist? I have written previously about opposing the repeal of Arkansas charging sales […]

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News, Spin

Fish in a Pork Barrel

If one wanted to blog observations — the more daily and more local the better — the time to start imprinting the habit couldn’t be better than one’s state Legislature’s general session. Forking pickles from a bucket. I hate easy pickin’s. So I’m hoping to just focus on matters that just might become law, not […]

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News, Spin

Carve Buchwald on Rushmore

A great columnist passes. It’s Art Buchwald, about whom I wrote nearly a year ago, when he’d been in hospice just a few weeks and well before he recovered enough to get thrown out. Actually he was a part of my master’s thesis of spring 2003, which researched the apparent death of the newspaper humor […]

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News, Spin

Goodwill Gesture

The incoming president of the Christian Coalition has agreed to withdraw. The Rev. Joel Hunter of Northland Church in Longland, Fla., according to news reports, wanted to expand aims of the political-evangelical group to include matters such as poverty and the environment, but the coalition prefers to stay focused on issues like abortion and same-sex […]