 From Michelle Goldberg at Newsweek:
Like many evangelicals in Iowa, Steve Deace, an influential conservative radio host, is wrestling with the possibility that Newt Gingrich may be the most viable standard bearer for family-values voters in the next election. It’s a conundrum, he says, that many others are also grappling with. “Maybe the guy in the race that would make the best president is on his third marriage,” he says. “How do we reconcile that?”
…
“Under normal circumstances, Gingrich would have some real problems with the social-conservative community,” says Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council. “But these aren’t normal circumstances.” Full story »
 From earlier this afternoon:
- Tim Tebow, late in the first half, finally completes his first pass. Guy at next table, vibrating with excitement, says to friend “they talk about Tebow being a football player, but that’s the great quarterback!”
- Tim Tebow runs for a couple of yards. Nearby fan to companion: “They should let Tebow call his own plays!!”
- In overtime, the offensive line opens a nice hole and Willis McGahee hits it for a big gainer. Broncos fan, as McGahee is running: “TEBOW!!!!!!” Full story »
I think at some point in our lives, most of us imagine that it might be cool to be famous. But perhaps…perhaps not like this.
 Full story »
 Tom Wicker, an exceptional journalist, writer, and thinker, is dead. I doubt my students have heard of him. That’s my fault; I should tell them more about the journalists past as well as present. His obituary in The New York Times recalls his brilliant career.
Wicker wrote good stories and abhorred the practices that produced bad stories. From The Times‘ obit:
Mr. Wicker’s “On Press” (1978) enlarged on complaints he had made for years: the myth of objectivity, reliance on official and anonymous sources. Far from being robust and uninhibited, he wrote, the press was often a toady to government and business.
In his honor, please permit me to revisit a post I wrote about Wicker some months ago. What makes a good news story? Or a bad one?
Nearly a decade ago, my university’s journalism school gave an award to Wicker, whose “In The Nation” column ran in The Times from 1966 through 1992. His columns were sufficiently critical of Richard Nixon to earn Wicker a place on Nixon’s enemies list.
In accepting our modest award, Wicker said, “Find out what you can and tell the people what you know.”
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  In an article in the September issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, poet Tony Hoagland traced the legacy of the New York School’s poetics. That legacy, he argues, has left contemporary poetry infused with “distractedness and haplessness,” which lowers the stakes and makes poetry “harmless in itself, quirky-cute, a sherbert-flavored course of hallucinogenic dessert art.”
There is, he suggested, “a kind of heroism and commitment missing from contemporary American poetry….”
Hoagland’s own poetry is filled with heroism of the everyday kind: slightly broken people trying to move through the world even as they’re besieged by consumerism, vapid media, and stuff. He’s wry and witty and keenly insightful, and everything always comes back to the struggle to understand what it means to be human.
Much contemporary poetry—at least of the post-New York School—forgets that struggle, though, and instead gets preoccupied by all that stuff. Full story »
 Freddie Mercury was my John Lennon.
I remember when Lennon was killed. I also remember the reactions of his fans. I liked The Beatles, of course, but they were a few years ahead of me. And Lennon’s solo work underwhelmed me. So it’s fair to say that I really didn’t get his importance to Baby Boomers or the powerful emotional connection that many of them felt to him. As a result, I didn’t quite fathom the oppressive pall that seemed to fall over every part of the world inhabited by Boomers when, on December 8, 1980, he was gunned down on the streets of New York City. The Beatles weren’t my band. They weren’t of my generation. John wasn’t my hero. And I had never lost a rock hero before.
But on November 24, 1991 – 20 years ago today – I came to understand perhaps a measure of the grief felt by my older friends and colleagues. On that day the man who had been my rock hero succumbed to AIDS. We had only learned a few days earlier that he even had the disease, and I had no idea that the end would come so quickly. Full story »
 Given the release of a second batch of hacked emails yesterday, S&R decided to pull this analysis from 2010 back to the front. The conclusions reached in this analysis are as applicable to the emails published in 2011 just as much as they are to the original emails from 2009.
It is impossible to draw firm conclusions from the hacked documents and emails. They do not represent the complete record, and they are not a random selection from the complete record.
- Dr. Timothy Osborn, Climatic Research Unit (source)
After several hundred hours of studying the emails and looking at their references, I have no hesitation in stating that, to my satisfaction, the system is rotten to the core and has been from the start.
- Geoff Sherrington, former corporate geologist, (source)
According to Osborn, there is not sufficient context to understand the “true” story behind the published Climatic Research Unit emails and documents. However, according to Sherrington, the emails and references contained therein provide all the context needed in order to conclude that climate change research is complete hogwash. Reality lies somewhere on a continuum between these two extremes – the question is where.
S&R set out to determine whether the published CRU emails provided enough context for the public to condemn or vindicate the scientists involved. After investigating three primary options and reading a key study, S&R has concluded that the emails do not themselves contain sufficient context to understand what really happened in climate science over the last 13 years. Full story »
See update at the end
If you follow climate news, you’re probably already aware that someone has illegally published another 5000 climate emails, probably from the original “Climategate” hack from two years ago. S&R is following the story and will publish a more in-depth analysis as we learn more. However, we feel it’s important to point out the following key facts about the original emails and their subsequent investigations:
Full story »
  Since we’re reclaiming our stake on Freddie Mercury this week, I suppose we need to reclaim all of him—including the schmaltz-fest that was Flash Gordon.
It’s common practice today for a band to accept a few bucks from someone who wants to appropriate its music for a soundtrack. Back in 1980, not so much. But Queen went far beyond that, aligning themselves so closely with science fiction schlock that they actually wrote the soundtrack.
And I loved every note of it.
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by Samantha Berkhead
Two hundred years ago, poetry dominated western society as the premier art form. Poets such as William Wordsworth and Lord Byron had a devoted readership of millions during and after their lifetimes. Words made sense of the surrounding world and its beauty as well as the often-elusive human soul.
Yet today, poetry occupies the outermost circles of our waning cultural focus.
The evidence lies at your fingertips. Do a comparative search between Kim Kardashian and William Wordsworth on Google Trends. You’ll see Kardashian’s graph gradually rise over time like an economist’s fantasy. Wordsworth’s, however, remains a flat line hugging the lowest part of the y-axis.
No “bright young things” in today’s world of poetry have captivated a mass audience. We think of poetry as a dry, snobby way to whine about our feelings; inaccessible words reserved for dust-covered academic types.
Full story »
Today I will get treated like the 1%. That is, the 1% of the world that are terrorists. Today, I am flying from Cleveland to Albuquerque. This sure isn’t what I thought being a member of the 1% would be like.
But, still, there are things to be grateful for.
We left on the Monday before Thanksgiving, so the security lines were short. On Wednesday, a lot more of the 99% will get the 1% treatment. And many will probably not maintain their sense of humor about it. Full story »
Journalism’s aggregator-in-chief, Jim Romenesko, has launched his new site, Jim Romenesko.com. In one of his first postings (it’s Romenesko -he has already been hard at work reporting and posting other content, so you have to scroll down to find this item) he gave his side of the Poynter saga. Poynter is considered the gold standard for continuing journalists’ education.
Romenesko was publicly corrected by his Poynter editor for not using quotations, just links, in his aggregations, a practice he’d been following for the dozen years he’d written the blog for Poynter.
I used blog posts and stories from Poynter, Columbia Journalism Review and others to launch a discussion on appropriate attribution for aggregators for students in my press law and ethics course at Michigan State University’s School of Journalism.
Well, whoever it is who gave us this as our logo, and these guys as our mascots, is still around, because the new batch of official London 2012 Olympics posters was released a little while ago, and they’re pretty dreadful. Uninspired is probably a better word, since they’re among the most boring posters you will ever see. It clearly follows from the fact that whatever committee this was decided to go for name artists, rather than run some sort of competition. So we’ve got the gaggle of usual suspects. Here’s probably the best of the bunch, from Adrian Hamilton:
And here’s the lot. Full story »
 In 1995, only a year after South Africa’s first democratic election, I was working at a community centre in Nyanga, a shanty-town alongside Cape Town’s international airport. The centre had started a project which aimed to give HIV-positive single mothers a safe place to live and work.
My self-appointed task was to assist with setting up income generation projects. I had a “real” job during the week and would arrive early on Saturday mornings to a queue of toddlers and tiny children waiting to be picked up and swung. Little happy, snotty faces with upstretched arms taking their turns and then running to the back of the line to have another go.
And every one of them HIV-positive.
One day a child, late to be swung, came running too quickly and slipped. She fell hard on the concrete and scraped her arm and leg. Blood flowed and she began to howl. I stooped to pick her up and a nurse grabbed me, pulling me back.
“No,” she said, her face sad, “let her mother pick her up,” indicating the blood and cuts on my hands from where I’d injured myself working on my car.
That was the moment that the death sentence implied by AIDS hit home. None of these children would live more than another few years. Full story »
 I’m late to the Mary Oliver party, I realize. Her first book of poems came out in 1963. By 1984, she was getting love from the Pulitzer committee. In 1992, the National Book Award committee gave her the nod. She’s won a slew of awards, and The New York Times has called her “far and away, this country’s best-selling poet.”
I found her, just this autumn, because of some owls.
In my attempt to feed my head full of poetry this semester, I picked up one of Mary Oliver’s many volumes from the bookstore shelf because the title caught my eye: Owls and Other Fantasies. Just the idea that a writer would look at an owl as a fantasy held promise.
Full story »
But he is Richard Nixon.
Stuart, longtime friend to S&R, is a veteran stage actor who portrays the former president in the Longmont (Colorado) Theatre Company‘s ambitious take on Frost/Nixon.
 I had the great pleasure of recently seeing the production. As a politics junkie and student of American political history, particularly of the Watergate debacle, I couldn’t pass it up. And I anticipated from having seen Stuart’s remarkable performance as Robert Scott in 2009′s Terra Nova that he would surely immerse himself in this unique role as well.
My high expectations were Full story »
by Richard A. Lee
 The topics dominating the discussion about the Republican primary for president – Rick Perry’s inability to recall the details of his own campaign proposal and the sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain – may be captivating, but they don’t tell us what we need to determine who is best equipped to serve in the Oval Office.
Sure, we’d like our leaders to be pillars of virtue, but there have been some very effective presidents, governors and mayors whose personal lives were not exactly role models. Likewise, Perry’s gaffe in the CNBC debate was downright embarrassing, but should our judgments on the next leader of the free world be based on a 53-second YouTube moment? There must be better ways to gauge who would be a good president.
Mitt Romney would have us believe that a proven track record of running a successful business will produce similar results in the White House. It’s a message that resonates well with voters who often lament that government should run more like a business. It sounds good in theory, but how it plays out in practice is a different story.
Full story »
THE ELECTRIC STAIRS
Gary Marmorstein
While Ed Ritter was on the land line with the manager of Mobility Lift and Elevator, he had to keep a finger in his other ear so he could hear above the noise of the giant vacuum cleaner upstairs.
“I’m sorry, sir, could you repeat that?”
“I asked, if I’m not being invasive or anything, what’s your father got?”
“He’s got lymphoma,” Ed said, then immediately regretted splashing the emphasis back in the manager’s face. In the months he’d been coming to New Jersey to see his father Joel through doctors’ appointments and visits with friends—visits that had recently acquired a valedictory tone—he was learning to forgive the awkward questions and comments of people who meant well. “He believes he’s going to die in the next few days. I was hoping to get you guys out here before that.” The first time Ed had called Mobility, he had followed the manager’s instructions and measured the width of the staircase in the mock Tudor house, and the manager had pronounced it too narrow for the brackets they had in stock to hold the chair’s track in place; the manager would call as soon as the special bracket came in from the supplier. But no one from Mobility had called again, and Joel was becoming impatient. “I want to die upstairs,” his father had been repeating at least twice a day. Full story »
 OK.
I, and most people who think they know something about football, have been pretty vocal about the fact that Tebow sucks as a quarterback. The people who disagree with us insist his intangibles make up for his lack of tangibles, an argument so absurd that we have trouble getting our heads around it. If tangibles don’t matter, maybe I should not have been so quick to dismiss a career as a porn star.
Of course, what drives most of us crazy is that the people who are making the argument for Tebow happen to be not only white, but bat-shit crazy evangelicals, raising the suspicion in our minds that maybe this isn’t about football and logic at all, but about racism or religion. After all, for years after blacks were finally allowed to play professional football they weren’t allowed to play quarterback because they lacked intangibles like intelligence, unlike white quarterbacks like Terry Bradshaw and Kerry Collins, the latter of whom was so smart that he thought his offensive line (the guys charged with protecting him) would enjoy hearing racist jokes. But Kerry failed to notice his O-line was black, and the next game they looked less like football players and more like matadors letting bulls rush by. In other words, the intelligence thing was yet another bit of back door discrimination. Full story »
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