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Around the Tubes - 8/15/07

  • How Green is your candidate? Grist will let you know with a new election '08 series and widget to deliver news directly to your blog of SocNet profile.
  • Think Progress reports that Fox's Daily Show knock-off, The Half-Hour News Hour, is getting canned:

    The reviews for the program were consistently dismal. Its very first review, from the Orlando Sentinel, decried the “[l]aughter, of an awfully canned variety, greets all the gags. Nothing happening on screen justifies these outbursts. … If we’re lucky, we’ll never hear of this dreadful show again.” “Sometimes the humor is so heavy-handed that it seems almost like self-parody,” said the New York Times. “The 1/2 Hour News Hour is slow torture all by itself,” said the Philadelpha Inquirer.

    What the right-wing failed to grasp is Jon Stewart is funny not because he spins falsehoods but because he tells the truth.

  • Student loan shenanigans continue. Nelnet is being forced to pay a $1million fine (peanuts, really) for deceptive marketing practices. This after Nebraska Attorney General Jim Bruning, who had originally "forgiven" Nelnet's fine, was revealed to have received campaign contributions from NelNet employees. The Higher Ed Watch article is ugly. Bruning goes to bat big-time for the corporate lenders, going so far as to call NY AG Cuomo's investigations into the industry (which have revealed major corruption) as an "embarassment." Bruning is the real embarassment. For any Nebraska FM readers: what can y'all do to get this joker out of office?
  • The Washington Blade profiles David Hardt and Chris Anderson, the new heads of the Young Democrats, who had this to say about the future of YDA:

    “Right now I want to grow the organization,” he said. “We need to have better organization and communication between the national organization and local chapters. Young people make up the largest voter block and we need to raise money to reach young voters.”

    Amen.

  • A blogger at Campus Progress notes that Senator Pat Leahy just wrapped up a bit piece in the new Batman movie. The blogger "doesn't know what to do with" the information, but I do - applaud it. Leahy is on the front lines right now in fighting Republican corruption in government. Yay on him for realizing that popular culture is a tool to embrace in that fight, not a pariah to attack (as some other Democrats seem to think *cough*Hillary and Lieberman*cough*).
  • "Fair and Balanced" Fox News got caught editing Democratic candidate Al Franken's Wikipedia entry.
  • Finally, what if the last five years were a giant Batman episode, and Dennis Kucinich a Superhero? Keep your eye out for Teen-Wolf Blitzer:

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August 15th, 2007 9:23am
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