The Only Thing I'm Going to Say about Casey Anthony

This lawyer is pretty much right.

And the fact that CNN is running it on its front page is pretty much symbolic of the circus.

Steven Colbert FTW

Steven Colbert wins so much.

"Colbert is literally wading through the crowd with a credit card swiper."

I would just like to point out that one comedian is engaged in an ongoing media crusade against Fox News, while the other is battling the federal government on campaign finance reform. I think Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert's business cards should read "comedian/social activist."

Lol@Propaganda

North Korea is seriously like either bad serious dystopian fiction or good comedic dystopian fiction. Struck by lightning?

Teaching to the Text Message

This is good stuff.

A wise writing teacher once told me: "shorter isn't better; longer isn't better; better is better." But conciseness is a virtue, and not just in journalism writing.

I think Selsberg has nailed it — there's real potential in teaching kids to write short before writing full. It's a lot easier to let out your writing than it is to rein it in.

Layabouts by Locale

I'm a sucker for lists like this.

Only two cities from my native Louisiana rank in the "most sedentary" list. New Orleans gets a D+ at #68, whereas dear old Baton Rouge gets a C+ at #36.

I suspect I didn't help BR's statistics. I think standing around in the heat oughtta count for something.

"Dark of the Moon" Gets Bad Reviews; No One is Surprised.

Kaboom.

I don't intend to see this movie, for all the reasons mentioned. Also, because anybody who can make movies with as cringeworthy dialogue as Bay's gets no room for the pretentious "Dark of the Moon" title. You, troglodyte, don't get to play games with the English language.

This Week in Duh(mb)

Newsweek's cover is, well, let's just say raising some interesting journalism ethics questions.

Well, not really. It's more just raising some interesting "who in their right mind would be dumb enough to" questions.

Obviously the magazine is trying to cash in on the public's obsession with Princess Diana and with Princess-What's-Her-Name. The fact that Diana still captures the minds of American audiences to the extent that Newsweek might make an ill-advised sortie back into her life amazes me -- in a kind of "palm suddenly applied to face"-type way.

Unexpected LSU Mentions

Apparently this flag-burning at LSU still hasn't entirely faded from memory.

Read the second-to-last graf of this otherwise unremarkable contribution to the miles-tall stack of 2012 Republican campaign columns.

Well that was unexpected. And I must say, bizarre. I don't know if this being to conspiracy-ish, but it's interesting that this pops up a month later in a paper owned by the same company as FoxNews, the only national outlet to give the event any real coverage.

UnCollege? Uncool.

As a recent graduate, this obviously drew my eyeballs.

A lot of the author's criticisms of college are fair, and I agree with them. But this author, like so many others, takes a few flaws and ruins something that's beneficial overall.

College taught me a lot. It may not all have been practically useful, but we know through science -- science that exists only because institutions of higher education exist -- that the type of thinking one does in college builds your brain.

But even beyond that perhaps holistic view -- a view know-it-all young entrepreneurs like this guy probably reject -- in practical terms it's overwhelmingly difficult for an overwhelming majority of young people to get a decent job without a degree. The author says we don't have a choice between Zuckerbergdom and low-wage drudgery, and he's technically right.

But only for a very few people.

The, Uh, Americans Are Coming, Uh, Or Something.

At this point it feels like a cheap shot to even mention it.

State of the Union

So that was a good one, as far as States of the Union go.

Whenever the President gives a speech like this, I always hear the same thing from people.

"That was just a bunch of fancy words. He didn't propose anything concrete."

They're right of course. Obama's speech, like every other SotU, was broad, eloquent and totally abstract.

What I fail to see is how this is a bad thing.

Think for a second -- would we really want to see a speech that gave concrete policy proposals?

The answer, of course, is no. Rhetoric is fun. Rhetoric is sexy.

Policy is boring.

While this may be a bit cynical, it's true. But even if that seems a little too Machiavellian for you, consider this: even if a President did somehow manage to make a speech with bullet points detailing how to fix the economy, how many of those points would Congress adopt?

The answer, of course, is we have no idea.

That's because a single man (or, more accurately, a single man and his legion of policy advisers and other assorted lackeys) can't and shouldn't make policy by himself. As painful as the sausage-factory that is Congress is sometimes, there's a reason why laws go through so much rigamarole before they hit the books.

These things need to be open from debate on all sides by all kinds of people. That includes Congressmen, our representatives (if they aren't too busy arguing), lobbyists, the people who work in or work for people who work in the industries (if they aren't too busy buying votes) and us (if we aren't too busy watching Jersey Shore.)

So a SotU isn't meant to be a policy laundry list. It's meant to help the President do what political scientists call agenda-setting.

Agenda-setting: n. The process by which political figures attempt to control what issues and what aspects of those issues are discussed in the court of public opinion through discussion in the news media.

(If you don't like my definition, try this scholar's.)

When the President talks about broad, sweeping issues, he's trying to use the huge podium this speech gives him to shepherd the public into talking about what issues he thinks are important.

Of course, this time around there's only one issue, and that's the economy, stupid. Democrats and Republicans and everybody who ever commented on politics ever agree that's the issue that's going to be the focus of public attention.

There, however, we get into the real agenda-setting battle. We know we need to fix the economy, but how do we do it?

Obama's answer in this speech is thus:

"Our free enterprise system is what drives innovation. But because it's not always profitable for companies to invest in basic research, throughout history our government has provided cutting-edge scientists and inventors with the support that they need."

Compare that to Paul Ryan's response to Obama's speech:

"Limited government and free enterprise have helped make America the greatest nation on earth."

For Obama, the way to fix the economy in the long-term -- to make the country competitive with other countries -- is to invest in green energy and education. For Ryan and the Republicans, it's cutting the deficit and letting the free enterprise system work it's magic.

That's the main debate we're going to see going forward. In part because of this speech, the larger agenda is set. Whose nitty-gritty agenda will end up being implemented, however, is yet to be seen.

Quote of the Day

"As God as my witness, in the commercial break just before the emotional moment, the producer got into my earpiece and he said, 'um, can you cut it down to 15 seconds so we get in this tennis result from Stuttgart?"

-Keith Olbermann, on leaving MSNBC

Hate to tell you, Keith, but most of us feel pretty much the way your producer did.

Republican Civil War

So Paul Ryan is giving the response to the State of the Union.

At least, he's giving the official response. But he ain't the only one.

Michele Bachmann, everybody's favorite Tea Party attack dog, is giving her own.

Which is almost comical, really.

For all their victories and supposed momentum, there's a well-documented and often-pontificated-upon divide in the Republican Party. How deep that divide goes and what it means for the party's chances is a big ole' unknown, no mater how many people claim to know it now.

Still, the fact that there are two responses to the State of the Union exposes some of the fracture lines between the two conservative factions.

On the one hand is Paul Ryan, a pragmatic policymaker -- the guy who proposed an austerity budget with real concrete suggestions even though he probably knew such a concept was foreign and laughable to his colleagues at the time.

On the other is Bachmann, who seems to be some kind of walking, breathing, kinda-sorta-thinking totem cut from the vague, zealous anger of the movement she represents.

This should be fun to watch.

How different will the tone, tenor, and (maybe, if we're lucky) actual policy suggestions the two speeches be? We dunno. But we can guess.

One has to assume Ryan will be more level-headed than Bachmann. If she doesn't spend half the speech saying "The American People rejected your agenda," or making general threats about the impending doom of the nation, we'll consider her speech reserved.

But what will Ryan do?

I'll be honest. I like Ryan. In a party that has not just accepted but openly embraced the label of "Party of No," in a party -- heck, a Congress -- that prefers ideological shortcuts and political sniping to making policy, Ryan stands out as one of the few that actually seems to propose hard solutions. In a political discourse mired in buzzwords and mudslinging, he speaks rationally.

I hope he speaks that way Tuesday night.