I read the TIME’s 10 Questions With Bill O’Reilly out of a sort of morbid curiosity, but I was a little surprised at what I found. My image of O’Reilly comes mostly from The Daily Show and YouTube videos posted on liberal news sites and blogs. I see him as a hot-headed self-important commentator parroting pretty standard conservative views. This may or may not be the case, but I found this comment refreshing:
Did your interview with Barack Obama change your opinion of him? Edward Pniewski LANSING, MICH.
I don’t endorse candidates, and I don’t tell people who to vote for, but I learned something about him: that he’s a sincere man and a tough guy. His policy is what he says it is. He’s no phony. He’s telling you: “I’m going to set up a big government apparatus, I’m going to redistribute income and I’m going to use more soft power than hard power abroad.” What he says is what he believes.
I like that. For a commentator who’s job is to shout opinions out to his viewers, he gives a fairly straightforward (and complimentary) reaction to interviewing Obama. Here’s a statement that you can look at and agree or disagree with without feeling insulted or feeling like your opinion has already been given to you. Good show.
I was having trouble finding this a few weeks ago, so I thought I’d point the way in case anyone else in interested in it.
Articles of Impeachment for President George W. Bush as presented by Dennis Kucinich.
Ack! I’ve been rejected for a role in the new Johnny Depp movie before I was even able to try out. I don’t understand how Hollywood can continue to harbor such a backward and discriminatory industry. It’s a little known issue, but in the entertainment industry there is a glass ceiling – a low-hanging glass ceiling that forces tall people to stand all hunched-over and awkward-like.
Thanks, Johnny Depp, for making me an outcast in my own town. Before you know it,pubs and movie theaters will be hanging those big yellow “low clearence” bars across their doors – preventing people like me from enterin. I don’t like where this is going. Not one bit.
It’s time that those of us on the fringes of height rally together – tall and short alike. And remember the words of one of the pioneers in the size-equity movement: “Size matters not!”
Well, it’s been a busy few months – tons has happened in the presidential primaries, Heath Ledger over-dosed, the president signed a stim-package to artificially boost the market instead of letting it regulate itself and maybe give people cause to spend more responsibly (no opinion on that), and . . . it seems like there’s something else big going on . . . Oh yeah, our country is at war in two places.
I decided to check around to see how we’re doing since I don’t think I’ve read anything about the Iraq war in a while (not to mention Afghanistan – I can barely even remember how to spell that it’s been so long). Let’s see: MSNBC – nothin’, FOX -nothin’ (ooh, but there’s an article about Paris Hilton!), USA Today – nothin’, BBC – nothin’, CNN – ooh! No, wait. It’s a casualty count – nothing about our progress over 
there. Still, you get points. How about Google? No?!
It worries me how easy it is as a citizen to forget that our country is at war in two countries and flirting with a few more. Maybe today, was just a slow news day – how about you folks that watch TV news – anything lately? The closest thing to war news I found on these major sites was that a wanted Hezbollah was killed by a car-bomb in Syria. That wasn’t even part of the war effort. I think it bothers me how little we are feeling the effects of this war. We don’t pay for it and lately we don’t even have to hear about it as much. Granted we’re probably just getting used to us being there and putting it in the back of our minds, but it bothers me that there doesn’t seem to be any sense of responsibility passed down to us.
My dad said something to me once – that if ten people die out of the blue, it’ll make headlines for weeks, but if ten people die every day, it’ll just fade out to page six and then out of sight altogether. Change is what makes news.
The New York Times and NPR both actually had easy-to-find articles focused on Iraq on their main pages.
NPR even has a little Iraq section along with Nation, Word, and Middle-East sections just under the headlines. In case you were curious, the Iraqi parliament is passing several laws that were required by US/Iraq benchmark agreements. Parliament proceedings have been tense and unproductive, so it’s important that they seem to be making progress again.
