The Daily Show - Poetry

Did you see The Daily Show last night (May 11, 2011)or did you hear about the poetry slam that was at the White House on one of the news programs? I missed The Daily Show but I did hear a portion of one of the poems by a gentleman known as Common. In the poem he was talking about equality and he ended the poem with three lines that simply blew me away. The line was, "One King's dreams was able to Barack us." The line was repeated three times. Now an individual that might have something positive to say AND was invited to the White House by the Obamas is an instant target for Fixed News(aka Fox News). They immediately did what they do best and took one portion of one line from one of Common's poems and quoted it completely out of context. This gave The Daily Show the opportunity to put together a really easy segment. (John Stewart should really send a thank you note to Fox News for making his job so easy.) Listen on this link to what John Stewart had to say about Fox News' commentary. (Be patient the clip starts out by talking about other subjects.)
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-may-11-2011/tone-def-poetry-jam?xrs=share_copy

It is really sad that a show that is designed as comedy is able to broadcast more accurately about the news of the day than a 24 hour news network. But then if we are really honest with ourselves we have to understand that Fox News is not news. The kindest way to characterize it is to call it commentary. The more accurate discription is propaganda.

Political Posts

There are two new side bars on Don Quixote of Rome. One is POLITICO.com and the other is PolitiFact.com. There will be selected posts on the side bars. You can "click" the word details under a meter on Politi Fact that will take you to that article and from there you can go to the full site. With POLITICO you can click either on the article to go to that article or click on the top of the side bar to take you to the full site. What you see from Politi Fact is the Truth-O-Meter which "grades" the truth of statements by people in the news. The "grades" go from pants on fire (a favorite of mine) to completely true. Enjoy the information from POLITICO and the ability of the Truth-O-Meter to keep celebrities "feet to the fire" with their public statements.

NEWSLADDER

Look for the new connection to News Ladder on the side bar on my blog (donquixoteofrome.blogspot.com) . News Ladder is a "media consortium", to quote News Ladder, of "Independent Journalism". Have fun exploring it and getting a different (progressive/liberal) slant on the news.

News

Looking over some of the old posts I noticed that one pointed to two widgets on the side of the blog that provided news. One was from Yahoo! and the other from the New York Times. Unfortunately the New York Times widget did not seem to be updating; so it has been replaced by BBC news. There is nothing wrong with the reporting of the New York Times (outside of the fact that that widget did not update) but the BBC gives a somewhat different world view and perhaps news that we may not get through our domestic news services. This is not to complain about our domestic news sources it is simply to say that we can see news through a different lens; a different world viewpoint.