In a midterm election where inflation over the past year has topped 8 percent, gasoline prices top $5/gallon in California and are nearly $4/gallon in most other states, well over half of those polled say the country is on the wrong track, and Joe Biden's job approval at just 42 percent, the Republican Party fell […]
I'm a big fan of words. I like putting them in order to convey meaning and describe concepts. I don't like the current attempts to redefine everything as part of a wider effort to delegitimize one side or change the terms of the political debate. The effort to change the meaning of words to benefit […]
We've passed the 50 day mark of the Biden presidency ("America Held Hostage") and the new president has yet to hold a press conference. His past 15 predecessors all held at least one in their first 33 days in office. There's a lot of speculation on the political right about why Biden is sticking to […]
President Joe Biden has held the office for less than a week, and it's becoming quickly apparent that we may be seeing a return to the fawning media coverage of the Obama administration, when both print and digital media saw their jobs to help the nation's first black president succeed. Now it is a duty […]
The past few days have been very interesting to me as someone who has worked in the media and cares about journalism. We have come to a point in American journalism where there is a reporting divide as big as the Grand Canyon, with liberals on one side and conservatives on the other. Closing the […]
For many people nowadays their local newspaper's endorsements are irrelevant. Younger people seldom get their news via the printed page and older people continue to do what older people do—die—thus slowly, but inevitably, leading to decreased subscription revenue. It's past time for newspapers, especially local ones, to do away with endorsements. While small, local newspapers […]
If the current political season is any indication (and it probably is) then there is plenty of evidence that too many people have lost their freaking minds. Two months ago, one of my friends on Facebook linked to this Gallup survey headlined: "25% in U.S. Say Neither Candidate Would Be a Good President." My succinct […]
On Friday, Reuters news service's fact-checking unit took on a meme going around on social media that lists five "facts" [scare quotes via Reuters] about Sen. Joe Biden's running mate, Kamala Harris. I won't go into all of the claims of this particular meme. Instead, I want to focus on one contentious fact about Harris' […]
I'll be on Dave Congalton's show in less than an hour talking California taxes. Late last week, Democrats in Sacramento unveiled a plan that would raise taxes on millionaires. Specifically, AB 1253 would add a new section to the Revenue and Taxation Code to provide the following three higher tax rates (in addition to the […]
The past couple of weeks have been especially bad for media fact-checking. Two incidents really stand out as the ostensibly unbiased, objective national media have gone all-in on their war on President Donald Trump, their own credibility be damned. Media Not Interested in Fact-Checking Sen. Tammy Duckworth Two Sundays ago, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) appeared […]