Rayne Today

Finally. The uproar over CBS' David Letterman's joke has begun to fade away, although not without the usual stupid overreaction by a couple of corporate sponsors who were spooked by fundamentalists without any sense of humor or proportion. And yet nobody has looked at the underlying cause of this brouhaha. Ask yourself this: If Palin had been a better parent to her children, would David Letterman have had any material for his wicked joke? Yeah. Sarah Palin is the real butt of the joke here, and she deserves it. The only problem with Letterman's joke is that he overshot, yielding collateral damage. Had he focused his aim at the appropriate target, there wouldn't have been any hubbub. Palin's the kind of parent who screams too loudly at hockey games, thinking that her kid's loss is a reflection on her. The kind of parent who's more worried about appearances than about substance. The kind of parent who can easily excise a child from her life if they crease the ...

WaPo's editorial page editor Fred Hiatt claimed it was low traffic which did in Dan Froomkin's blog. The truth is still quite sketchy, but uglier and not about traffic. Jane wrote yesterday about the Washington Post's ugly practices which squelched Dan Froomkin's traffic; she's also looked at WaPo's flat traffic in comparison to the increasingly popular Huffington Post and newspaper competitor The New York Times. And I've already looked at the performance of the op-ed team as well; we can rule out Hiatt's lame excuse about traffic as the reason for Froomkin's exit when half the team is doing badly or worse. We might be tempted ignore WaPo's less-than-happy performance and cut the crusty old newspaper some slack as they adapt to the internet, but unfortunately, WaPo cannot claim a lack of institutional knowledge about internet-based media. Most of us have forgotten that WaPo's parent The Washington Post Company owns Slate.com ; in internet...

Wow, has this place accumulated dust. Has it really been that long since I posted here? I guess I can't deny it, there it is in black and white. I haven't posted since last November. Conversely, you can see from my Twitter feed below at right that I've been posting at least a few times a week. Guess this means I can muster 140 characters easily, but not enough to post a full blog entry. And yet this isn't true, either. I've posted content at Firedoglake's Oxdown Gazette at least a couple of times a month. But for some reason I can't seem to organize the energy to cross-post here at my own blog. Ditto for the Facebook accounts -- plural. I exist as a pseudonym and as my real self, an account for each, and I've somehow choked out a few updates every so often at each account. (I draw the line at MySpace; you will never find me there since I'm not an entertainer.) Perhaps it's time I looked at a tool which would allow one entry to update all my out...