Culture/Society

I suppose that mocking Republican candidates is an essential element of a Washington Post editorial writer's job description.  Even so, it was jarring to hear the snide comments of WaPo editorialist Jonathan Capehart [seen right in file photo] about Sarah Palin read on the air today.  Not merely did he mock her shopping habits, Capehart came very close to accusing Palin of . . . "child abuse."…

On October 13, The New York Times gravely informed us that the economy was causing stress for travelers. Not just the economy in general, but specifically that the "crisis on Wall Street was the No. 1 cause of anxiety" for travelers. And, they had a survey to prove it, too. Or so NYT writer Paul Burnham Finney claimed. But, on October 21 the Times was forced to issue a little correction to Finney…

CNN contributor Roland Martin used an unoriginal line to attack Rush Limbaugh on Monday’s Election Center program. Host Campbell Brown wanted Martin, a Barack Obama supporter, to comment on something the talk radio host had said about Colin Powell’s endorsement of the Democratic presidential candidate: "Rush Limbaugh said today, this is about race. That's all it's about." Martin’s response: "I…

If only elderly voters in California would die off in large enough numbers before November 4, then the final nail could be hammered in the coffin of California Proposition 8, a ballot initiative that would define marriage as between a man and a woman. That according to liberal activist Kristina Wilfore, the executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, "an advocacy organization…

An Arkansas TV reporter that had a bit part in Oliver Stone's movie "W" was found beaten unconscious in her Little Rock home on October 20 and in its report on the crime the Associated Press seemed to decide that she was beaten merely because she had appeared in the movie though this impression the AP seems to have is not supported by the police. One wonders why the AP decided to spend almost…

Forget zombies, vampires, ghosts and goblins. TodayShow.com contributor Marisa Belger is spooked by how eco-unfriendly Halloween is (via Daily Gut):Halloween can be an especially eco-unfriendly holiday. There’s the single-use plastic of red devil costumes, countless candy wrappers (not to mention the refined sugar, high-fructose corn syrup and artificial color of the candies themselves) and…

Prices shouldn't be set by supply and demand.  They should be determined by, well, what prices "should" be.  That's the innovative theory Maggie Rodriguez propounded on today's Early Show.The Early Show anchor's unique take on economics came in the course of a segment on the falling price of gasoline.  Rodriguez lamented to co-anchor Chris Wragge that grocery prices weren't falling along with gas…

Entertainment Weekly's Joshua Rich reported on the weekend's box office returns for the latest releases on October 19 to let us all in on Hollywood's successes and failures, because, you know, Hollywood is important and all. We find that the Chihuahua movie is still going like gangbusters ($70 million in three weeks) and the horrid movie "Max Payne" led the weekend's receipts with $18 million.…

Brent Bozell's culture column this week focused on his attempts to take young 11-year-old son Reid to the multiuplex on a Saturday. He was First, a gratingly long list of mediocre R-rated movies: Blindness (rated R): Completely hopeless film about people catching an infectious disease of blindness and getting rounded up in a mental asylum.Quarantine (R): Completely hopeless film about a TV news…

Not that any of us here could possibly be surprised -- I say that to head off the inevitable comments asking how we could be -- but a new study from the Center for Media and Public Affairs finds that late-night comedians attack Republicans far more than they do Democrats. In fact, the CMPA found a lopsided 7 to 1 ratio of Republican compared to Democrat jokes. "The total: Republicans, 286.…

A Colombian associate of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is once again linked to FARC terrorists and Marxist Dictator Hugo Chavez with the revelation of damning new messages concerning Colombian Senator Piedad Córdoba that are currently being investigated by Colombian military officials. Once again we have a powerful American politician, this one the Speaker of the House of Representatives…

On Monday’s Newsroom program, CNN European political editor Robin Oakley pontificated to Senators McCain and Obama on how the U.S. can be more liked by people in Europe. The U.K. native’s advice -- change the country’s policies, especially its conservative ones, so it’s more like the European Union. The best example of this came when Oakley brought up the issue of guns: "While we're on the…

Over at RealDebateWisconsin Fred Dooley was contacted by the mother of a Racine Unified School District 8th grade student in Wisconsin public schools about an outrageous thing she found in her son's school textbook. Apparently, in this textbook supposedly teaching about literature, one of the books being pushed as a perfect example of that subject is Barack Obama's memoir Dreams from my Father.…