BilmBlog500

Here's a letter I sent to several reporters at the Washington Post about the, um, "struggles" of the Trump administration to tell the truth.  Curious when or if anyone will respond... Dear Messrs. Rucker, Hudson, Harris and Dawsey: I am writing about a line from an article of yours from last Tuesday’s paper which i find deeply troubling, which is  "The result is a credibility crisis for an administration that has long struggled to communicate factual information to the public.” Your colleague Margaret Sullivan, whom I am cc’ing, writes frequently about the media’s need to do a better job covering the Trump administration, and this sentence is a poster child for falling short of the mark. I understand the constraints journalists operate under.  I know, as an example, that there are strong legal reasons to use the words “alleged killer” prior to the plea or guilty verdict.  Even when it’s obvious. But I do not believe that the circumlocution you used in last Tuesday’s ...

I'll let the Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein have the last word on the deal President Obama cut with Republican leaders on taxes. His column explains much better than I what Obama maybe shoulda done, why the Democrats in Congress have to take a big hit on blame themselves, and why maybe though I'd wish it weren't so the deal isn't as bad as we professional lefties would like to think. And in his subsequent column which you can find here , Pearlstein goes after one of my favorite targets, the Democratic Senator from Montana Max Baucus. He was one of the only Democrats to support the Bush tax legislation in 2001 (believe you me, I don't need Steven Pearlstein to remind me of that!), and helped stall the health care bill this year with months of pointless negotiations. Now, somebody should have reined him in during that time (Reid, Obama, someone), but he's a poster child for the kind of off-rez stupid behavior that Democrats seem to put u...

Updated twice, final 4:07 EST. The New York Times Week in Review section reprinted this Pat Bagley cartoon from the Salt Lake Tribune, which is one of the few comparisons in the TSA debate that I don't find utterly false. In fact, I find it rather funny. In the midst of all of its columnists telling us to take our pats and shut up, their Sunday Outlook section has a column by Jeffrey Rosen that dares to flat-out call the current regime unconstitutional. And Rosen is not a hypocritical Republican, he's not some immature person for Ruth Marcus to yell at, he's a long-time legal affairs writer, a professor at George Washington School of Law, legal affairs editor for The New Republic, often published in the Times as well, check out his GW bio here . Click here to find the 2nd quarter earnings release from Barnes & Noble. Same store sales were down a relatively modest 3.3%, loss was $12.6M, with the expectation that the lion and lamb will lie next to one another and s...

I'd give the Kindle 3 slithy toads. This seems a good day to write about the Kindle. I boarded a crowded Amtrak train to head down for a Charlaine Harris signing in Newark, DE, and while I was reading my Kindle I noticed a man across the aisle reading a Sony Reader. Whatever is the world coming to? So first, why do I have a Kindle, and not a Sony Reader? Well, I am a Mac person. The Sony Reader requires you buy stuff at the Sony Store, and they haven't made it easy to sync purchases on a Mac. I tried once to see if I could go to Sony's web site and at least check out the offerings and didn't even find that very easy to do. The Kindle, you don't even need a computer since you can shop wirelessly from within the Kindle. It also offered a feature that I found very tempting, that you could email your .doc files to your Kindle and have them show up there wirelessly for a ten cent fee. Some people think it's silly to pay to send your own files to yourself, b...