The Big Picture and the Closeup

How is the Pope like a Peruvian steamship? The State Department stopped both of them from getting sued. You’re right; it’s not funny at all.

It is tempting to view the stories told in [Eric] Boehlert’s two books, one chronicling the failure of the mainstream media to report the news and the other revealing the success of the blogs in doing so, as being parts of the same story. Maybe the mainstream media would not be failing from a business perspective were they not, most of the time, failing from a news-reporting perspective as well. Maybe the blogs would not be succeeding, albeit under their mostly profit-agnostic criteria, were they not beginning to seize the standard of bona fide reporting falling from the grasp of the mainstream media as they tumble lifeless upon the field of economic battle.

If power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, as Kissinger said, and in a National Enquirer world we always learn about the sex lives of the powerful, we have to get smarter about how we react to what we always find out.

Without the aid of the courts, Congress is no match for the Executive. Presidents decide, period. Congress, outgunned by the Executive and deserted by the Judiciary, goes along. The Framers would have been dismayed.

Laws that give law a bad name. They do not and cannot bind the conscience. The only problem: Everyone has his/her own list of unforgivable laws.