On a normal news day, it can be cool to work in a television newsroom. After all, I see feeds of news stories all day long from the network and its stations around the country. I see more footage than most typical viewers, because most local stations don’t have enough news programming to use everything that is available. Unless you keep your eyes glued to CNN or MSNBC…or even Fox News…you probably wouldn’t see everything that I see passing by.
On days like the past few, working in …

Cindy Sheehan now says she’s glad President Bush refused to meet with her as she camped outside his Crawford, Texas ranch.
“If he’d met with me, then I would have gone home, and it would have ended there,” she told the Associated Press on Tuesday.
She also stated, “I look back on it, and I am very, very, very grateful he did not meet with me, because we have sparked and galvanized the peace movement.”
Almost sounds like she had a vested interest in Bush not meeting with her, …

In a striking bit of irony, Venezuelan President Pat Robertson said the United States should assassinate, has offered food and assistance to the Gulf Coast area ravaged by Katrina and subsequent flooding, according to a report by Yahoo! News.
“We place at the disposition of the people of the United States in the event of shortages — we have drinking water, food, we can provide fuel,” Chavez told reporters.
A frequent critic of the United States and a target himself of US disapproval, Chavez last week offered discount gasoline to poor Americans …

A recent article at “RantingProfs” accuses a CBS news crew of throwing a “cheap shot” at the pro-war side:
“But CBS’s Mark Knoller, while using the clip of a parent speaking, takes careful pains to point out that she is ‘the mother of a Marine safely home.’
You see the trick here.
Quote a parent, but be sure to quote one whose son is back home with his family, and only that parent, subtly making the argument that her support for the war (presumably the support of that entire group, since Knoller shows …

I will try to redeem myself for last week’s blunder of question #6. Sorry to the early players last week for giving you a question that didn’t make as much sense as it should have. (I did correct the question later, so if you go back now, you’ll see what it should have read from the start.)
Amanda of “The Private Drama of My Life” (a private journal) was first to play last week. Congratulations, Amanda!
Last week’s questions marked the first time that Jennifer and Redsneakz played …

Do we need laws to define what publishing versus self publishing really mean? Jim Winter over at “Northcoast Exile” says we do, all because of Print On Demand (POD) technology and the havoc it is wreaking in the industry.
While POD was supposed to revolutionize publishing by allowing for more smaller presses to compete with the larger ones and allow for a smaller financial risk, POD also created two unfortunate side effects, Winter says.
One of them is that the vanity presses and scam artists have run amok.
Any time …

Shelly recently posted her take on speaking out in blogs, after reading a Chicago Tribune article about employees who have been fired for blogging about their jobs.
(Out of respect to her wishes, I did not post a response in her blog and I am not posting a link to her entry.)
In any case, she makes excellent points and I agree wholeheartedly with her take on Freedom of Speech, and the notion that freedoms and rights come with responsibilities.
She states:
When I see people get into nasty arguments online, aka the horrid …

There are a lot of calls for truth these days. This standard doesn’t seem to apply, apparently, in the doctor’s office. According to a report from ABC News, Dr. Terry Bennett, a man who believes in “telling it like it is” learned how dangerous that can be after a woman he allegedly said was overweight left his office and went straight to the medical board!
What’s even more outrageous here is that the New Hampshire Board of Medicine reprimanded Bennett and the state’s attorney general asked him to take a medical …

“It’s either fantasy or smut — and that’s sad,” says one concerned parent, on the options available to young teen readers these days.
According to a report by MSNBC, the “racy reads” are the publishing industry’s fastest-growing segment and that young girls are the biggest consumers.
The concern for parents is that books like Rainbow Party, Teach Me and the Gossip Girl series depict teens and sex in ways that might make sex seem attractive to their kids. In Rainbow Party, a book that received a lot of attention before it …

Think you hate getting all of those credit card offers in the mail? Your frustration probably doesn’t hold a candle to that of Sami Habbas, a grocery store manager from Corona, California.
Habbas received a credit card offer from JP Morgan Chase. The problem? It was addressed to “Palestinian Bomber.” When he opened the letter, it began, “Dear Palestinian Bomber.”
According to a report from ABC News, Habbas, a naturalized US citizen who has lived in America for 51 years and served in the US Army, …

Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson acknowledged late today what the rest of us already knew: that he did, in fact, call for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Monday’s broadcast of “The 700 Club.”
At first, on today’s broadcast, according to CBS News, he denied having made that statement and claimed that his remarks had been misunderstood. Here’s what CBS is reporting he said:
“August is a slow news day but it seems like the whole world is talking about my comments about Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.
“I …

Author Tod Goldberg has a regular feature in his blog: he criticizes the generally-stupid and inane questions received by Walter Scott’s Personality Parade. The column runs weekly in the Parade magazine insert in most Sunday newspapers.
Most of the questions, which are supposed to be sent online, can be answered online by going to resources like the Internet Movie Database or by doing a simple Google search. But that doesn’t stop people from asking Personality Parade, anyway.
But one question, Tod says, takes the cake. And …