Covering an Obama Victory

clipped from www.slate.com Reporters do their least self-conscious work when they're startled by a story they hadn't prepared to write. Think of the astonishing coverage of the 9/11 attack, natural disasters, and the 2000 election-that-would-not-end. But giving a reporter (or a pundit) too much time to think about a historic event such as VE Day, the moon landing, the fall of Communism, or the release of Nelson Mandela is like entering him into a grandiosity competition to see who can squeeze the most poetry out of his keyboard. Suddenly, everybody with a notepad and a word processor thinks he's Norman Mailer.

Jack Shafer writes below in his latest column for Slate.com.

Should the polls hold true, it will be very interesting to watch the coverage of an Obama victory. I for one will be overwhelmed with joy and will probably grab at every scrap of news coverage I can find.

It will be like when the Royals won 9 games out of the gate in 2003 and the next off-season, everybody had to treat them like legitimate post season contenders. I couldn't get my eyeballs on enough positive coverage of my favorite team.

This will be just like that, only with coverage from every news organization known to man, and of an event with ramifications of slightly more important than the result of some baseball games (slightly more).

Political - Please Use Fact Check

My Dad just gave me a great quote, which I'm surely getting wrong:

"The Republicans started out using weapons of mass destruction. Now they are using weapons of mass distraction."

As the presidential race really heats up in the next month, please take a few minutes each week to go to FactCheck.org and browse the articles they post. It's independent and it gives you the actual facts, with no spin.

Find out the truth, and vote based on that, not on what you see or here on the TV, Radio and Internet. There's just too much bullsh!t in the news these days.

clipped from www.factcheck.org

Politics - History of Pigs and Lipstick

This story from CNN is what makes me love and hate the political process at the same time.

Love: The fact that everybody is up in arms about whether or not Obama was referring to VP candidate Palin when he used the common colloquialism "you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig."

Hate: That people will probably think he's attacking all working mothers by saying they are pigs who put on lipstick and oink their way through the work day.

Love: That CNN gives a brief but fairly full history of politicians using the phrase. (See quoted paragraph below)

Hate: That nobody will read past the headline of this story.

clipped from www.cnn.com Other politicians have also used the phrase in recent years, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington state, Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Rep. John Mica of Florida and Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, among others.