I haven't been posting here about the Sinclair Broadcast Group's abuse of the public's airwaves. Atrios and Josh Marshall are all over this story if you need the details. The broad outline: Sinclair owns a network of local affiliate TV stations infamous for its right-wing views. Each local station is required to run ultra-conservative editorials by a Sinclair exec. You may also remember these folks from their refusal to air the Nightline broadcast that paid tribute to the soldiers killed... Read more

From Ron Suskind's must-read article, "Without a Doubt," in Sunday's New York Times Magazine: In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very... Read more

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is fondly revered as the tale of a decent common man who goes to the halls of power and triumphs over corruption through simple honesty and determination. That's a nice story. But that's not what happens in the movie. Jimmy Stewart's Jefferson Smith is a decent, common man who goes to Washington and is destroyed utterly by corrupt men who control not just the government but also the press. Frank Capra's film offers a pessimistic... Read more

I got a package this weekend from Wm. B. Eerdmans containing my review copy of Gordon Atkinson's book. Atkinson is probably better known to you, as he is to me, as "The Preacher" — as in the Real Live Preacher. His book, which includes a graceful foreword by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, collects many of his essays from the blog, as well as a few appearing here for the first time. If you're a regular reader of RLP then you're already... Read more

In a post titled "The man who planted trees" I described the work of a couple of InterVarsity missionaries who nourished small groups of Christian students throughout Eastern Europe before the fall of communism. I didn't mean to imply that missionaries or Christianity were the keys to the eventual collapse of Soviet tyranny. But those missionaries did play a small part by affirming and encouraging the exercise of rights not respected or acknowledged by the communist governments of the region.... Read more

Via Cursor, I finally got to read Joshua Green's long Atlantic Monthly article on ethically challenged political strategist Karl Rove. Peking Duck offers a cache of the full article here. Green notes Rove's political smarts and fierce attention to detail, but shows how Rove's greatest asset as a win-at-any-cost political hired gun is his "a willingness to fight in territory where conscience forbids most others." A few examples: The fake attack on your own candidate According to someone who worked... Read more

From The Times (U.K.): Can there be any certainty in the death of Jacques Derrida? The obituarists' objective attempts to place his life in a finite context are, necessarily, subject to epistemic relativism, the idea that all such scientific theories are mere "narrations" or social constructions. Surely, a postmodernist deconstruction of their import would inevitably question the foundational conceptual categories of prior science — among them, Derrida's own existence — which become problematised and relativised. This conceptual revolution has profound... Read more

'Superman' star Christopher Reeve dies at age 52 NEW YORK (AP) — Christopher Reeve, the star of the Superman movies whose near-fatal riding accident nine years ago turned him into a worldwide advocate for spinal cord research, died Sunday of heart failure, his publicist said. He was 52. Reeve fell into a coma Saturday after going into cardiac arrest while at his New York home, his publicist, Wesley Combs told The Associated Press by phone from Washington, D.C., on Sunday... Read more