Author: media girl

When do 80,000 dead, tens of thousands more facing death count as news?

I am talking about the post-earthquake horror in Pakistan.

photo

I can’t say which is worse: embarrassment and shame that I haven’t blogged this yet? Or embarrassment and shame that virtually nobody in the blogosphere has written a single thing about this.

But worse than embarrassment or shame is the horrible situation in Pakistan, where tens of thousands have died, and tens of thousands more, including children, still have not received any aid.

Let’s look at the facts:

50,000 dead, maybe more, many of whom were children, who were in school at the moment the quake hit.

photo

10,000 more children are facing imminent death due to injury, infection, disease, starvation, dehydration, exposure to the sub-zero temperatures at night. 120,000 children are at risk.

Read More

Progressive schmogressive! What’s in a word, anyway?

From mediagirl.org:

Ask a dozen progressives what progressive means, and you’ll probably get a dozen answers. But odds are that they’ll all touch on the same core values: human and civil rights, effective government, improving the social safety net, including healthcare, anti-poverty programs and unemployment programs. Individuals will have their priorities within these areas, but this is the terrain. The priorities of individual progressives are not mutually exclusive. It’s a progressive coalition based on values.

Today, in one of his more weakly-reasoned posts in a year of some real doozies, Markos attempts to toss progressivism out the window and claim for himself leader of “the new progressives.” True progressivism apparently is a real problem for progressives, but most of us just don’t realize it.

The basis of this claim?

Wait for it….

The generation gap. (Oh, if I could buy the world a Coke!)

Read More

Fools rush in (or why Miers may not be the real nominee)

(NOTE: UPDATE BELOW)

It hasn’t taken long for the big blog boys on the right and left to sound off on Harriet Miers. Not surprisingly, Markos and John Aravosis are already salivating. Apparently a Bush insider is just dandy for them. They seem to think this is a huge GOP blunder. Markos goes so far as to claim that Miers is a moderate — though how he would figure that, given that she has virtually no paper trail, who knows?

Here’s another take:

Karl Rove is no fool, and perhaps John and Markos and gloating Dems are falling for a feint. What happens if there’s enough suspicion and resistance on both sides of the aisle so that she cannot win an up or down vote?

Is Harriet Miers simply a red herring nominee whose rejection would set up nomination of a certified radical? Think about it….

[posted on mediagirl.org….]

Read More