Friday, 03/28/03
bumppo.net has been listing toward full-time political commentary, insofar as it's full-time anything. Until the last few days I'd had a hard time concentrating on the nonpolitical, so I've been forcing myself to deal with something else. As I attempt to dial down bumppo.net's political output, let me leave you with a few choice resources:
- BBC America has been running BBC newsfeeds whenever they have anything substantial to report. Everyone seems to believe this is just the sort of situation 24-hour news was invented to cover, but I think that's horseshit. When I turn on BBC America and am confronted with a rerun of Changing Rooms, it means nothing very important happened in the last three hours, and now I don't have to spend ten minutes watching CNN to reach the same conclusion. The Beeb doesn't accost me with any flickering flag emblems, or news crawls, or terror alert levels dancing around the anchors' heads. The anchors are not blowdried automatons, and seem more likely to deliver news that Americans might not want to hear. The calming British accents are a nice bonus.
- Tim Bray uncovered the BBC Reporters' log, a capital idea and a positive milestone in the history of war correspondence. By the next war, everybody's going to have one of these, and at this rate, the next war could come by Christmas.
- The Daily Show, on Comedy Central, is an oasis. Sure, it's comedy - they reported sand-day school closings in Basra - but where else did you hear correspondents spitballing appropriate adjectives like "greed-tastic" for Halliburton's being awarded the first Iraq contract? That's right, nowhere. They're the closest thing we've got to a liberal media.
- I read Josh Marshall a couple times a day now. His writing on Turkey and the related topic of administration incompetence continues to amaze. The Democrat who wins the nomination and fails to run a campaign addressing Marshall's favorite subjects, deserves to lose.
10:41AM «
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