It's hard to imagine Hillary conceding to Obama. It's hard to imagine Hillary conceding to anything. The woman's tenacity is legend. I watched her campaign not so much for her message but to see what she'll do next, how she'll bounce back, what new rationale she'll invoke as her reason for staying in what all clear-thinking people saw as a lost race.
In the end, she was painful to watch, computing her odds with her own math, unflinching and deep in denial. But like a car wreck, you just can't look away.
Obama made history, but all eyes are on Hillary. We can't help it — she's makes excellent TV.
Obama's soaring speeches caused generations to time travel back to the age of Camelot, where he and Michelle could be the young king and queen to a young and still dreamy America. Obama is the stuff of Life Magazine: oozing charisma in grainy black and white.
That charisma and the internet — it's powerful alchemy.
Hillary, on the other hand, is very much about today. Reality-TV today. Bill Clinton in a brawl with a college student in YouTube today. Chelsea: None-of-your-business today. Hillary in tears, why-don't-you-like-me today. Hillary in SNL, Live from New York It's Saturday Night today.
Today, the CNN panel post mortems the car wreck that was her campaign. There is a riveting flashback of what went horribly wrong. The lost message. The Bill factor. The sniper fire story that backfired. Like Anna Nicole's descent and Britney Spears' breakdown, the collapse now looks inevitable. And cruelly entertaining.
No wonder Hillary doesn't quit. We pundits just wouldn't know how to go on.
Television has always been about high contrasts. Heroes against villains. Pros versus Cons. The powerful versus the marginalized. Rich versus poor. Doves against Hawks.
And the Hillary-Obama match made in TV heaven. For a medium largely concerned with images and sound, it could only see black versus white, man against woman, the strong but tempered voice of Obama versus the near-shrill Hillary screaming Choose Me! Choose Me!
What is life without Hillary? In a word, McCain. A man who disappears in the glare of television and is either in the shadow of Bush, or worse, behind his wife Elvira. With the entire Republican machinery solidly behind him, and with a head start of several months, the best McCain could come up with was: "That's Not Change We Can Believe In."
Huh. Dude, are you sure you want to go with that? Do you need another couple of months to think of another line?
I don't know. He survived torture in enemy hands, but I wish he had gotten more out of it than the ability to walk like a hotdog. Obama's going to cream you.
Some good will come out of this. Jon Stewart will have a field day. David Letterman and Steven Colbert, too. What we will lose in depth and heft, we will make up for with jokes. But after months of nail-biting suspense and a shifting landscape only John King could navigate with his magic board, it's becoming increasingly clear that, yes, we will be bored.
I hate Hillary and I miss her already.
It's hard to imagine Hillary conceding to Obama. It's hard to imagine Hillary conceding to anything. The woman's tenacity is legend. I watched her campaign not so much for her message but to see what she'll do next, how she'll bounce back, what new rationale she'll invoke as her reason for staying in what all clear-thinking people saw as a lost race.
In the end, she was painful to watch, computing her odds with her own math, unflinching and deep in denial. But like a car wreck, you just can't look away.
Obama made history, but all eyes are on Hillary. We can't help it -- she's makes excellent TV.
Obama's soaring speeches caused generations to time travel back to the age of Camelot, where he and Michelle could be the young king and queen to a young and still dreamy America. Obama is the stuff of Life Magazine: oozing charisma in grainy black and white.
That charisma and the internet -- it's powerful alchemy.
Hillary, on the other hand, is very much about today. Reality-TV today. Bill Clinton in a brawl with a college student in YouTube today. Chelsea: None-of-your-business today. Hillary in tears, why-don't-you-like-me today. Hillary in SNL, Live from New York It's Saturday Night today.
Today, the CNN panel post mortems the car wreck that was her campaign. There is a riveting flashback of what went horribly wrong. The lost message. The Bill factor. The sniper fire story that backfired. Like Anna Nicole's descent and Britney Spears' breakdown, the collapse now looks inevitable. And cruelly entertaining.
No wonder Hillary doesn't quit. We pundits just wouldn't know how to go on.
As more and more is known about Cho Seung-Hui, the student gunman who mowed down 32 of his fellow students and professors, more and more of us allow ourselves to feel some sort of relief, as this event becomes less and less of a mystery:
He was a loner. He had been taking medication for depression and was becoming increasingly violent and erratic. He wrote bizarre and violent screenplays that featured fights resolved through the throwing of hammers and attacks with a chainsaw. He was South Korean, a foreigner implanted in American land who never quite felt at home. In his backpack, an 8 page rant against rich kids and religion. On the sign-in sheet where everyone else had written their names, Cho had written a question mark. "Is your name, Question mark?" the professor asked him. Cho did not respond.
He is no longer a question mark, but an exclamation point.
(with quotes from AP)
Don't blame you if you dropped out on me. I, afterall, dropped out first. Having lost all interest in Gloria and been almost permanently stunned silent by God's constant surprises such the freak accident of Steve Irwin, the unceremonious firing of Pluto, and the daily reminder that life is a mystery:George W. Bush.
Why the comeback? Something equally mysterious and tantalizing and just (daily)life-affirming: the N93! My guys, they made mobile blogging as easy as texting. It is partners with typepad (my server), and the phone allows you to post text and photos with maybe three clicks of a button (maybe less if i read the manual).
For some reason, I think I'd take great photos with this thing... yet another of life's great mysteries.
What's on my mind lately? I'm ashamed to say it's not the death penalty, Iran nuclear weapons, but this:
Cruise to eat nutritious placenta
Hollywood actor and Scientologist Tom Cruise is planning to eat Katie Holmes' placenta.
It is the latest in a series of strange revelations by the 43-year-old 'Mission: Impossible' star about the child he is expecting with fiancée Katie Holmes.
Cruise told GQ magazine: "I'm gonna eat the placenta. I thought that would be good. Very nutritious. I'm gonna eat the cord and the placenta right there."
Cruise has also claimed he knew that Katie Holmes was pregnant before she told him.
He has also defended the Scientology belief that women should give birth in silence.
"It's really about respecting the woman. It's not about her not screaming," he told GQ.
Cruise plans to marry 27-year-old Holmes in the summer. He said earlier this month that their baby was due "any day now".
(postcript: katie just gave birth to a girl that she's not allowed to talk to for 7 days and must have minimal contact with so that the baby doesn't associate the trauma of birth with her mother. (yeah right, whatever, but what about the father?)
to square one, that is, trying to restart, refresh, reboot my floundering career as compulsive note-taker. Not that there's anything noteworthy about what I say today. Just one helluva HELLO! and WHATS UP WITH WORLD, MAMA!? The frontpages show a snickering Gloria doing the Chacha. She's sucking my vital life force and making me .... too weak...too...lazy...to..go.. to the.. streets... or...even....blog.
Wake me up when its over.
Still no time to write but must help in effort to knock some sense into President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. (Has she gone mad?! ). So will let Neal Cruz do the talking:
Let me educate these officials, as simply as possible, about the basic principles of journalism. Let's call it Journalism 101.
Newspapers exist to report news. They were born out of a need by the people to know what is going on in their government and society. And what is news? It is defined as "anything unusual." The classic example is that if a dog bites a man, it is not news; but if a man bites a dog, then that is news. Cases of dogs biting humans are common, so it is not interesting to readers, but humans biting dogs are indeed rare and readers would be eager to know why he did it and how the dog reacted.
So why does the press play down or ignore something good that a public official does and play up anything bad that he does?
Of course. Because public officials are expected to do good -- that's their job; that's nothing unusual. But when they do something bad, that's unusual and they're not supposed to do that. So that is news.
When the time comes when the situation is reversed, when doing good is so rare it becomes news and doing bad so common that it is no longer news, then we would be in a very sorry state indeed. We are already slowly going into that. Stories of honest cab drivers and janitors returning money they found now make the front pages. Is that an indication that honesty has now become so rare that it is now front-page news?
Aren't we all expected to be honest at all times, from the President (and especially the President) down to the janitor? That is why when a president cheats in an election, it is big news. That is why when a president lies, it is big news. That is why when a president steals, it is big news. That is why when presidential relatives accept bribes from gambling lords, it is big news. They are not supposed to do those things.
As for those stories Ate Glue complained about, they were not invented by the press. These are facts-they actually happened. All the press did was report them, which its duty. It was just the messenger. But Ate Glue wants to shoot the messenger for bringing the message.
Ate Glue has nobody to blame but herself for all the bad press she is getting. There is one surefire way to always get a good press: Always do good, and don't do anything bad.
There's been a lot of pressure on news organizations to come up with more positive news and highlight the good over the bad and the ugly. In ABS CBN, the search for at least one good news a day is practically mandatory. Inquirer makes it a point to publish a positive Sunday story. Great, I say, for as long as they are newsworthy and for as long as there is no attempt to perfume reality.
Nothing should get in the way of our job of telling the truth. And the need for more truth telling has never been greater.
Inquirer's editorial serves as a reminder to all journalists:
To understand why more bad news than good news is published in the papers, we have to know the nature of news. A popular definition of news is this: "When a dog bites a man, that is not news. When a man bites a dog, that is news." This definition stresses the "oddity" aspect of the news.
Another definition says that news is a story about an aberration or a sensational exception to the norm. Thus, journalists like to point out that every day all over the world, tens of thousands of airplanes land safely at airports, but that is not news because it is normal--a safe landing is always expected. But when an airplane crashes, that is not normal and that is news.
Second, when it comes to political, social and economic news, in a liberal democracy like ours, the media are expected to be adversarial. They act as watchdogs, exposing irregularities in government and in society as a whole. And the media expose these irregularities not only for the sake of digging up dirt. They expose wrongdoings and wrong practices so that they will not be repeated, the erring people punished and the wrong procedures corrected.
Jose Rizal, in dedicating "Noli Me Tangere" to his "Motherland," said: "Desiring your well-being, which is our own, and searching for the best cure, I will do with you as the ancients of old did with their afflicted: expose them on the steps of the temple so that each one who would come to invoke the Divine, would propose a cure for them.
"And to this end, I will attempt to faithfully reproduce your condition without much ado. I will lift part of the shroud that conceals your illness, sacrificing to the truth everything."
We would like to think that present-day Filipino journalists are spiritual and moral heirs of Rizal and the Propagandists who exposed what was wrong in Philippine society during their time so that these wrongs could be remedied.
Third, the negative stories being written by journalists are not products of their imagination; they are based on facts, on observation, on records and reports, on statistics and interviews. In reporting negative news, journalists are, like the actors who received an exhortation from Hamlet, only holding "the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own features, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure."
But journalists all over the world are becoming more concerned about the media's "negative bias." And they are doing something to correct the imbalance. To cite our own practice, the Inquirer has long been publishing "positive Sunday issues" where most of the stories on the front page are positive, heart-warming and inspiring. Everyday, Inquirer editors try to include at least one positive story on Page 1. ABS-CBN and GMA 7 always have at least one positive story in their newscasts.
Geneva Oberholser, former ombudsman of The Washington Post, has a good piece of advice for her colleagues: "[P]resenting an accurate picture means showing the courage and joy and victory that surrounds us, too. Avoid framing everything as conflict. Emphasize substance over process. Don't exaggerate problems and pathologies. Behave as a citizen and a journalist: Report, write and edit as if you care about where you live.''
This is good advice that all socially responsible journalists should take to heart and practice.
It boggles the mind how a super power like the United States can't shut down the Al-Qaida when there they are publicly announcing job openings --- not for Osama bin Laden cave sweeper, cave guard, and official beard trimmer --- but for cushy first world jobs like video producers and editors. Jobs that possibly require broadband and Final Cut Pro.
I mean check this out!
London-based Asharq al-Awsat said on its website this week that al-Qaida had "vacant positions" for video production and for editing statements, footage and international media coverage about militants in Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Chechnya and other conflict zones where militants are active.
The paper said the Global Islamic Media Front, an al-Qaida-linked, web-based organization, would "follow up with members interested in joining and contact them via e-mail."
If you're wondering what this job would entail, it might help you to know that
Last month it issued an English-language video on the internet called Jihad Hidden Camera which showed sniping and bombing attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq, and carried comical sound effects as well as laugh tracks.
As for salaries and perks:
The advert does not specify salary amounts, but added: "Every Muslim knows his life is not his, since it belongs to this violated Islamic nation whose blood is being spilled. Nothing should take precedence over this."
Yikes.