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Everyone claims that they don’t like negative ads but the truth is that they’re an effective way for someone to gain ground against a political opponent. So usually it’s the political challenger who goes negative against the incumbent. But this being the crazy year it is, more incumbents are vulnerable and going negative. One of those is Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla.
What we have here is a highly partisan op-ed page piece — it’s written by Jim Towey, a George W. Bush staffer — on an openly conservative editorial page that bluntly protests a situation in the mainstream press that certainly looks painfully partisan.
That’s all I could think of when I read this line in a Fortune magazine article about why we’ve seen no lawsuits from Facebook or its founder Mark Zuckerberg despite all the likelihood that “The Social Network,” compelling as I expect it to be, is based more on fiction than fact:
Here inside the only Beltway that matters, the insiders, experts and politicos are going through one of their favorite rituals — a season of fevered discussions about the latest Bob Woodward book offering inside gossip about all the president’s people. As always, these holy days begin with a series of A1 excerpts from said volume in the Washington Post.
Apparently Archbishop Charles Chaput struck a nerve with Mark Silk, professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America.
Once again, our friends at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life have unleashed another survey that is causing waves of ink to crash into the mainstream press. This time around, the numbers are rather predictable — revealing that Americans, as a rule, have lots of feelings about religion in their hearts, but not that much information in their heads.
At my home congregation in Oklahoma, our two Sunday morning assemblies drew 1,256 people on a recent weekend. That same Sunday, just 540 worshipers returned for the evening service. In a fellowship that traditionally has placed a high value on church attendance, that’s a lot of people “forsaking the assembly.”
