You’re 17 years old. For some reason you’ve decided you want to go to college to learn how to be a journalist. My hat’s off to you — first, for wanting to go to college, and second, for wanting to answer what I still consider to be a calling to public service.

Journalists find out things, then tell people what they found out. Often, it’s stuff people want to hear. But a good journalist must tell people what they need to hear — even if they don’t want to hear it. So I’m glad you want to become one of us.

Perhaps you’ve had training already. Your high school has a student-run paper, a radio station, even a broadcast television studio. You know Twitter and Facebook and perhaps write your own blog.

Your parents might be opposed to your choice. They’ve heard journalism is dying, newspapers are closing, and so on. They’ve heard journalists don’t get paid much. But you’ve done your homework. You believe opportunity will rise from the ashes of an outdated business model corporations imposed on journalism as a profession and a calling. And you’d like to be one of the pioneers who have a hand in its rebirth.

So (whether you like it or not) I have a few suggestions to offer. The first is simple:

If you’re not nosey, learn to be. Right now. Journalists must be curious about the world around them. So much of their work begins with an understanding of their own lived experience and observations.
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It’s as though Tennyson were writing about the past year, isn’t it?

In Memoriam (Ring Out, Wild Bells)

by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
   The flying cloud, the frosty light:
   The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. Full story »

Welcome to the 2010 Climate B.S. of the Year Award.

2010 saw widespread and growing evidence of rapidly warming global climate and strengthening scientific understanding of how humans are contributing to climate change. Yet on the policy front, little happened to stem the growing emissions of greenhouse gases or to help societies prepare for increasingly severe negative climate impacts, including now unavoidable changes in temperature, rainfall patterns, sea-level rise, snowpack, glacial extent, Arctic sea ice, and more. These physical impacts will lead to sharply increased disease, military and economic instabilities, food and water shortages, and extreme weather events, among other things. Without appropriate risk management action, the United States will be hit hard. There is no safe haven. Yet confusion and uncertainty about climate change remain high in the minds of too many members of the public and Congress.

Why? In large part because of a concerted, coordinated, aggressive campaign by a small group of well-funded climate change deniers and contrarians focused on intentionally misleading the public and policymakers with bad science about climate change. Much of this effort is based on intentional falsehoods, misrepresentations, inflated uncertainties, and pure and utter B.S. about climate science. These efforts have been successful in sowing confusion and delaying action – just as the same tactics were successful in delaying efforts to tackle tobacco’s health risks.

To counter this campaign of disinformation, we are issuing the first in what may become a series of awards for the most egregious Climate B.S.^* of the Year. Full story »

If you’ve ever wondered what the twelve days of Christmas are—you’re in the middle of them. According to legend, the three wise men saw the Star of Bethlehem on Christmas and it took them twelve days of travel to get to the party. Their arrival, celebrated now on January 6, is known as the Feast of the Epiphany.

But what happened to them during their twelve-day trip?

According to novelist Paul Harrington, the “epic journey” was something like “Indiana Jones meets Lawrence of Arabia at a Lord of the Rings barbecue.” Full story »

There are times when I think Obama is the smartest politician I have seen in my lifetime, and there are times when I’m scratching my head, wondering what the hell? Most of the latter occurrences arise in the context of Obama’s Justice Department, which, as far as I can tell, has yet to prosecute a single Bush administration official for malfeasance, although I may have missed it if it did happen. Then there’s Afghanistan, which looks like an unholy mess. Then there’s financial reform—or, more specifically, the lack of it, which I trace directly to Obama’s very foolhardy appointments of Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, under the aegis of that old charlatan, Robert Rubin. If Obama loses his re-election effort, it will be because he listened to people like Rubin and Summers and Geithner, instead of ignoring them completely, which would have been the smarter thing to do given their roles in creating the mess to begin with.

Then there’s the environmental and climate stuff, where I had high hopes. And I’m very glad we’ve got some EPA enforcement again. But then there’s the biofuels boondoggle, suggesting that Obama is just another farm state senator. Well, that’s sort of ordinary and predictable stuff, the kind of stuff that any senator (or ex-Senator who becomes President) does—look at the otherwise generally admirable Chuck Schumer and his entanglements with the financial industry. But what do I make of this—the Obama administration has filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization against China’s renewable energy subsidies.
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I’m not the first guy to raise this question and I won’t be the last, but what the heck, let’s talk about it.

A lot of Americans think of themselves as “progressive christians” or “liberal christians,” and I count a good number of them among my friends and colleagues. Not long ago I was talking to one of these friends and we wandered into the subject of religion. Dawkins and Harris were invoked, as might be expected. Anti-Dawkins and -Harris resistance was encountered, also expected. So I finally decided to ask some questions that I had always wanted answers to, but had never actually asked.

The ensuing conversation went something like this:

Me: Do you believe that Mary was a virgin? Full story »

Get ready for five years of misery, self-absorption, class warfare, occasional (perhaps even frequent) denials of racism, interminable militaristic posturing, and so much more. The US is about to start commemorating, if that’s the word, the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War. Well, maybe not everyone in the US—just the South, which will wallow endlessly in its victimhood for being on the receiving end of the Northern Occupation–or at least for the next five years. And the media, of course, which already has shown over the past two years that it just can’t get enough of ignorance, bigotry and outright fantasy about the past. Why, it’s as if the 20th century never happened.

This is going to be bad, horrible, even. We’re in for five years of paeans to alleged Southern valor, interminable babble about “State’s Rights,” debates about the flying of the Confederate Flag, odes by Southern politicians to the sanctity of our Christian heritage (from the part of the country that leads the US in violent crimes and executions) and our god-given right to own other human beings—no, wait. That last part won’t be talked about much. Full story »

“We are the clear logic used to unveil wrongdoing. The general public, clouded by misleading information mostly by the media with a political agenda, fails to see and understand this wrongdoing. Because of this, those who do the wrongdoing escape unpunished. Anonymous is here to ensure punishment does not go unserved to those who deserve it.” – Anonymous spokesperson for the group Anonymous, which brought down Visa and Mastercard Web sites because of the companies’ withdrawal of services from free speech target wikileaks.org.

Anonymous is the group that published emails from Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! account back in 2008, when she was a candidate for vice president. Full story »

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Back in August, the University of Colorado proposed the discontinuance of its School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Since I hold a doctoral degree from the SJMC, I was more than a little bit interested. The move stood to affect people I know and regard highly, and I couldn’t help wondering how badly shutting the doors would devalue my degree. It has been difficult to form hard and fast opinions, though, since the university still hasn’t decided how things will be parceled out once the dust settles.

To suggest that the administration lacks clarity at this point is to engage in dramatic understatement. Full story »

by Kate Torok

I was going through some drawers in our hutch about two months ago, reorganizing and cleaning, finding all sorts of things. Candles, old Valentine’s Day cards, pictures, a frame we never used, and the—I found it. It was a crumpled up, torn-off, semi-folded piece of paper, and written on it, were my New Year’s Resolutions for 2010. Suddenly, I remembered the night I wrote it back in 2009. I remember being fired up that I WOULD achieve all of the things on my list.

And looking back, sadly, I achieved none.

At the risk of you losing you now because I’m not going to get into the list itself, let’s just say that I always aim pretty high. I have a “go big or go home” attitude. And to that end, I wrote things down that, in retrospect, I can now say I didn’t have a shot in hell at completing.

So, in the spirit of not dwelling on the past, and only looking forward—here is my New Year’s resolution list for 2011:

1. Read more. Full story »

We can’t stop. We have to keep going. He have to keep going. Don’t we?

Watch this. Right now. Then bookmark it, because I want you to come back and watch it at least once a week until you have it memorized. Also, I’d be grateful if you’d drop me a line every so often reminding me that I need to watch it again, too.

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Something less than 228 hours to go.

I found a gypsy. That is, I think she was a gypsy, although she maintained she was Lithuanian. I offered to escort her to the train tracks, which was obviously a Lithuanian idiom I didn’t know existed, because it meant something altogether different than the sum of its parts. We made a quick exchange of funds, and I ran, her Eastern European “conductor” right behind me.

For those of you who think I’m making light of a situation I consider as serious as any I have faced, let me point out that this very morning, I read an obituary of some poor individual who died yesterday. He was 55. He seemed fine yesterday, but now he’s dead. I felt fine yesterday, but today I woke up with a cold, that I am sure will turn to pneumonia and put me in the ground in just a few days. Full story »

We do not know the amount of invisible money injected into politics that resulted from the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in January that permitted anonymous corporate political spending.

But we can count the visible money, campaign contributions that the law requires be reported. No matter what the hot-button issue is on the public’s (er, media’s) agenda at any given time, the big money given to congressional candidates comes from the same sources.

More than three years ago, I analyzed data from the Center for Responsive Politics, looking at donations since 1990. Here were the top givers:

Since 1990, lawyers and law firms have made nearly $781 million in campaign contributions, ranking them No. 1. (Adding in the lobbyists makes that nearly $900 million.)

At No. 2 are the retired folks who want to protect what they spent a lifetime accumulating. The AARP faction has made nearly $662 million in campaign contributions since 1990.

At No. 3 is the securities and investments industry (which the AARP set leans on to protect its wealth), which has made $463 million in campaign contributions since 1990.

At No. 4: Real estate at $456 million.

At No. 5: Health professionals at nearly $360 million.

Nothing’s changed. The same groups are still pushing more money into congressional campaigns than another other special interests. But the game is different now: This is only the money we can see. Citizens United permits anonymity: Now we worry about political money we cannot see or count.
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by Zack Witzel

Succinct. Compact. Crisp.

A successful short story can captivate. It can console. It can discomfort. And all in just one sitting.

In short fiction, writers must force themselves to choose each word carefully. The balance of a story can depend on every noun, verb and adjective.

Short stories and novels share many aspects, yes. Both, on a base level, tell a fictional narrative. Both showcase a writer’s talents. Both require a command of language.

But several things certainly differentiate the two genres.
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You know the company’s in trouble when the auditor tells the company that its bookkeeper can’t manage the company’s finances, reconcile balance sheets among different departments, or prepare credible financial statements.

And you know it’s real trouble when the auditor can’t even do an audit and provide the company with a statement of its financial health — or ill health.

That’s what Gene Dodaro, acting comptroller general of the United States and head of the Government Accounting Office, has told the federal government about its fiscal 2010 books: You’re in deep fiscal do-do. Said Dodaro:

Even though significant progress has been made since the enactment of key financial management reforms in the 1990s, our report on the U.S. government’s consolidated financial statement illustrates that much work remains to be done to improve federal financial management.

Apparently, the feds don’t know what to count, how to count it, and how to report the count.
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The Marines are arguably the most conservative branch of the US armed forces. This is borne out in the results of a survey of 400,000 Service members where 21% of all Service members felt negatively about repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT), compared to 32% of Marines who felt negatively. It is also borne out by the fact that the Marine commandant , General James Amos, has been saying that repeal would negatively affect the Marine Corps. Marines, like other Service members, take their cues from the top, and since the top Marine commander has been publicly against repeal, it’s entirely reasonable that the rest of the Corps would be against repeal as well.

And that’s the reason that Richard Cohen of the Washington Post called in his column today for Amos to resign. It may well be that, as Cohen says, Amos “is one step short of being a bigot” and has “not an iota of sympathy for what might be their difficulties or any tolerance for their lifestyle.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Amos should be forced out. Full story »