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Longtime New York Times television writer Bill Carroll has applied the blue America vs. red America motif to TV programming, finding that “choices of viewers, whether in Los Angeles or Salt Lake City, New York or Birmingham, Ala., are remarkably similar.”
Quite a few of you out in GetReligion land have joined me in the search for liberal paranoia about the smash hit status of The Incredibles.
This is a minor little lifestyles feature from last week, but it is still bugging me. There is a ghost in here, methinks. The topic is “third places,” which reporter Sherry Stripling of the Seattle Times defines as:
Retired Lt. Col. Ralph Peters has been a byline to watch for since he wrote a famous article for the Winter 2001 issue of Parameters, the deepthink journal of the U.S. Army War College. Titled "Stability, America’s Enemy," the wide-ranging piece argued that the U.S.’s strategic insistence on maintaining a superficial peace by keeping foreign regimes intact was misguided.
Thursday’s dedication ceremonies for the Clinton Presidential Center offered some stirring images — including the presidential families all standing to watch Bono and the Edge performing (Windows Media) — and generous examples of presidents seeing the best in one another.
One of the toughest clauses in the basic religion-beat reporter contract is the one that states: “Thou shalt write at least one or two stories every year during every major religious holiday and these stories may not be recycled more than once a decade.” Ugh.
Dawn Eden, a longtime music writer and now a copy editor at the New York Post, today celebrates her first appearance on an op-ed page with her witty piece “The Grinch Who Stole Messiah.” Eden criticizes the South Orange/Maplewood School District’s policy of banning religious music — now including instrumentals — during students’ holiday concerts.
It is impossible for the nation’s Catholic bishops to gather in Washington, D.C., without making some kind of news.
Here’s another story from the tidal wave just after the election that has continued to bother me a bit. The headline was “G.O.P. Adviser Says Bush’s Evangelical Strategy Split Country” and the basic concept was that the Christian right has totally taken control of the Republican Party, according to veteran GOP consultant Arthur Finkelstein. It now has veto power over the party’s choice for president. (Hear that, Rudy?) Early on, he says: “From now on, anyone who belongs to the Republican Party will automatically find himself in the same group as the opponents of abortion, and anyone who supports abortion will automatically be labeled a Democrat.” Actually, if you read that statement in a mirror, you’d have a pretty good summary of the 2004 Democratic Party platform.
