The politicization of pancakes

When the California Secretary of State released the latest report on donors to Proposition 8 related campaigns, I was a bit surprised at the lack of coverage. But then stories started rolling in. The latest filing shows that gay marriage supporters raised $43.3 million while Prop. 8 supporters raised $39.9 million. It was already known to be an expensive campaign, but those numbers are pretty impressive. People care about this issue, it seems.


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Really, you shouldn't have

When Roger Ebert was watching The Charlie Rose Show and saw director Tony Scott describe The Reader as another Holocaust movie, it set off a blog reverie on truth-telling. Ebert, who lost his voice after a protracted and heroic struggle with thyroid cancer and related complications, writes of keeping silent too often in past years. Now his words pour through the keyboard with startling ease:


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"Abortion reduction" gets some ink

Remember when President Bill Clinton said he wanted abortion to be safe, legal and rare? Remember how he was pro-lifers’ favorite president? Oh wait, that’s right, the “safe, legal and rare” formulation isn’t a pro-life mantra but a pro-choice mantra. And Bill Clinton fit perfectly in the pro-choice camp.


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Rookie five

There’s a one-room schoolhouse down the road from where we live. When I drive by, as I do almost every day, I think about the girls and boys who sat near the coal stove, studied at the old wooden desks, played outside in the shade of the huge old trees.


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Breaking news: sex sells

A few years ago, a “wardrobe malfunction” grabbed the country’s attention during the nation’s annual celebration of consumerism and marketing (and in-between, there were some violent expressions of athleticism). Amongst this year’s Super Bowl commercials, marketers for a certain Internet domain registrar and Web hosting company grabbed its fair share of attention by producing an ad that was deemed “the most watched commercial among TiVo users.”


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"Badly botched" doesn't quite cover it

We frequently discuss the “ghosts” that are present in various stories. It pains me to use that term for this story about a child born at 23 weeks gestation who was allegedly killed by an abortion clinic owner outside Miami. This is another story that had been percolating around the internet before being picked up by mainstream media this week.


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Back into a church-state minefield

As strange as it sounds, the coverage of President Barack Obama’s new White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships has me yearning for the clarity of the Bill Clinton years.


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Covering accusations responsibly

I am impressed with Laurie Goodstein’s story in the New York Times about reports that the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, an influential Catholic order, had an affair with a woman and fathered a daughter. The Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado was deeply revered by many, even after Pope Benedict XVI had forced him to leave public ministry over a completely different set of accusations dealing with sexual abuse of students. Many followers had felt that those accusations were unproved.


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