Attacking your own advertisers

For some reason, the businesses run by the Koch brothers started advertising on The Daily Show and this gave Jon Stewart the opportunity to launch an attack on them and the way they are using their money to buy politicians. That is an interesting thing to see. Usually broadcasters tend to give the sponsors of their show kid glove treatment, something that businesses know and take advantage of to buy the silence of news organizations, as media watcher Jeff Cohen noted some time ago.
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Walking While Woman

To the categories of Driving While Black and Flying While Muslim and similar ones that highlight the way some groups are targeted for engaging in activities that would pass unnoticed if done by others, we now need to add Walking While Woman. The secretly recorded video of a woman dressed in ordinary street clothes walking through the streets of New York for 10 hours in one day, and the various types of unwanted attention she received has garnered much notice providing evidence, if anyone still needed it, that the world inhabited by women can quite different from that inhabited by men, as is the case with people of color versus white and rich versus poor.
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Who says assault vehicles are unnecessary?

Roger Hoeppner, a 75-year old resident of a rural Wisconsin county, has had a long-standing dispute with local authorities. He was challenging the zoning rules that they said required him to move some wooden pallets in his front yard. As he continued to defy them, the local authorities did what any small community when confronted with an elderly resident who was being difficult.
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The stupidest person in Congress

Stephen Colbert makes the case for congressman Louie Gohmert who wins it even in the face of stiff competition from the likes of Michele Bachmann. I sometimes wonder whether he could be as stupid as he really seems to be and whether he is really quite savvy and has figured out that by saying deliberately stupid things, he gets a lot of media attention. But that would require him to be a really good actor, worthy of an award.
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The person who brought Snowden, Poitras, and Greenwald together

Micah Lee has a fascinating account about the role he played as an intermediary in enabling Edward Snowden to contact Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald and thus breaking the huge story. He was the initial contact for Snowden who had been unable to communicate securely with Poitras and Greenwald. Lee was a staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the chief technology officer of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, his public encryption key was available and had solid digital signature guarantees. Snowden thought that Lee could be trusted and would know the public key for Poitras, which he did
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Abusing the power of government

I am not a reflexive foe of government. I believe in government and that it can and should serve individuals and communities by providing the kinds of services that can only be done collectively, and protect individuals from the power of bigger entities like corporations by creating and implementing regulations that protect workers, keep our water and air clean, and doing all the other things that only a government can do such as maintaining the necessary infrastructure. The Tea Partiers’ goal of eliminating government except for the police and military is something I vigorously oppose.
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