The Federal Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C., has decided the FCC's "broadcast flag" rule -- a code which would tell televisions, VCRs and DVD players what they could and could not play -- overstepped the commission's authority. The FCC argued that its ancillary powers authorize it to regulate the reception of broadcasts, not just […]
Senate minority leader Harry Reid made waves late last year when he went on "Meet the Press" and attacked Justice Clarence Thomas for being a poor writer and a bad justice. When asked to comment on Thomas as a possible replacement for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Reid told NBC's "Meet the Press": "I think that […]
I just got finished reading John Fund's book "Stealing Elections" -- if reading it doesn't cause your blood pressure to go through the roof, then call the coroner, because you're dead. At just over 150 pages, Fund's book goes very fast -- and that's a good thing. Over the course of the book Fund recounts […]
It really shouldn't come as any big surprise that MSNBC blogger/The Nation media critic Eric Alterman is wrong when it comes to one of his major theses on media bias: "You're only as liberal as the man who owns you." (That's the title of chapter two of Alterman's book "What Liberal Media?") Really? That's not […]
The Mexican government has once again decided that it's good public policy to distribute a guide -- with a DVD -- informing Mexican citizens how to illegally enter the United States. This sort of thing raises barely a whiff of outrage in Washington -- and certainly not from anyone in the Bush administration. It made […]
Arnold Kling has an excellent piece up at Tech Central Station on the Larry Summers controversy. At the University of Maryland, my oldest daughter, Rachel, took a class in which one test included a question in which she was asked to respond to the statement "Gender is socially determined." This was given, not as an […]
I must admint that I was both heartened and disappointed when I read New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent's column this weekend. I was heartened by Okrent's expressed desire for more dialogue with readers than the paper's letters section currently allows. A newspaper can only come out better in the end when it provides […]
I was interviewing for an editing job several years ago at a different newspaper and I was asked which was more important to have in a beat journalist: a good reporter or a good writer. My response that day was I'd rather have a good reporter. Bad writing I can work on -- I can […]