When Washington Lobbies Pony Up for Budding Photojournalists

The past few days I’ve been in Washington DC at a Campus Progress training summit.  We’ve been talking about effective journalism, writing good ledes, weighing the ethics of journalism against the challenges of being a college student, and other important facets of the profession.
One of my assignments is to take some digital photographs and construct [...]

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A City Built Upon a Hill? Political Rhetoric, Imperialism, and American Exceptionalism

On our Election Day last month, I woke up, put on my sandals and a jacket, and walked across the street to cast my vote in the presidential election. My expression of democratic freedom marked the end of a three month stretch, in which I along with many others have been saturated with blather [...]

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25 News Stories that Need More Coverage

Of late I have become an avid listener of NPR’s On the Media. As good as this program is in holding our corporate media accountable, it still pales in comparison to Project Censored, a longstanding independent study of U.S. media.  The project, which is run by students and faculty at Sonoma State University, seeks to [...]

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Vote Nader 2008

In “Civil Disobedience,” an essay I like to assign in the classes that I teach, Henry David Thoreau voices the frustration of living in a country whose government is the primary agent of injustice.  Then, as today, the United States was burdened by an expensive war of imperial aggression.  The institution of slavery was frowned [...]

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We Are Exerting our Military Might in Iraq and Elsewhere, Remember?

Another Presidential debate has come and gone, and neither candidate engaged the problem of our nation’s military aggression against “forces of evil” to any level of consequence.  Worse, issues like health care and our economic crisis functioned as talking points, seemingly unrelated to the way our country chooses to spend its money.  According to Barack [...]

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The U.S. Media and the War

This week’s recommendation is a short documentary, War Made Easy:  How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death.  This film outlines our nation’s recent trend of using the media to legitimize wars of aggression, most of which are initiated on dubious grounds.
Among the many great points that this film makes is the fallacy of [...]

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Sarah Palin and Reasons Why Churches Should Not Have Tax Exempt Status

In the days since Sarah Palin emerged as the Republican VP candidate, droves of artifacts from her past have surfaced.  Apparently she’s a former beauty pageant contestant, sportscaster, PTA supporter, small town mayor, avowed hockey mom, and (unfortunately) a member of an Assemblies of God church.
A video from Wasilla Assembly of God in Alaska that [...]

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The End…Is Near: Don Thompson’s Apocalyptic Nightmare

If it seems like this blog is plowing along, that’s because it is. It’s the end of the semester, and I’m in an apocalyptic mood, not because I have a bunch of term papers due, but because I’m teaching my least favorite book of the New Testament, the Revelation. One member of my Sunday School [...]

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President Bush Eats Cats

Yes, it’s true. Our President’s moral compass has gone so violently afoul that he has taken to eating kittens. I wouldn’t have believed it until I saw it with my own eyes.

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