Journalism

The Arizona legislature is considering a proposal to authorize the carrying of weapons on campus by faculty members. The idea is simple — in case of trouble in the classroom, somebody needs to be able to blast away at problem students. But the question arises, should all faculty members be armed?
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A new batch of Nixon White House tapes and documents were released by the National Archives in 2010, putting the former president back on page one. Herewith, the top ten:

10. “The Irish can’t drink. What you always have to remember with the Irish is they get mean. Virtually every Irish I’ve known gets mean when he drinks.” –to Chuck Colson,  White House hatchet man, Feb. 13, 1973.
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Remembering John Lennon on the Diane Rehm Show, along with Philip Norman, author of John Lennon: A Life, and Richard Harrington, former music critic for the Washington Post: Listen HERE.

It was 30 years ago today: Dec. 8, 1980, on what would turn out to be the last day of John Lennon’s life, he did an interview promoting his new album, “Double Fantasy.” He talked about the sixties: “The thing the sixties did was show us the possibility and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn’t the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.”
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At a high school in Riverside in 1991, student Aaron Salinger wrote the lyrics to “Imagine” on the stripes of an American flag as an art project. It was Lennon’s birthday and the Persian Gulf War was underway, and Salinger and his friends carried the “Imagine” flag in an antiwar demonstration. Aaron’s mother, Sharon V. Salinger, now dean of undergraduate education at UC Irvine, remembers being summoned to the principal’s office after Aaron was suspended for “desecrating the flag.” . . . Continued at LATimes.com HERE.

Lennon’s legacy lives on, 30 years after his death : CNN’s  Candy Crowley interviews Jon Wiener on “State of the Nation.”  WATCH Streaming video HERE.

Sarah Palin could win the presidency in 2012—that’s what Frank Rich [1] said in the New York Times on Sunday—but not in a two-person head-to-head race. For Palin to beat Obama, a third-party candidate would have to run, and take votes away from Obama.

And we have a potential third-party spoiler, Rich says: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
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“LENNONYC” tells the story of Lennon’s move to New York City in 1971 with Yoko Ono, his anti-war activism, the Nixon Administration’s effort to deport him, and the music he made in the last nine years of his life. It features interviews with musicians who worked with Lennon, plus immigration attorney Leon Wildes, photographer Bob Gruen, historian Jon Wiener, and Yoko Ono, who provided never-before-seen home movies. Director/writer: Michael Epstein.

Of all the characters in the last 40 years of Doonesbury, my personal favorite is Mr. Butts—and not just because he appeared on the cover of The Nation (Jan. 1, 1996).  Garry Trudeau has had lots of more compelling characters, but Mr. Butts in his own way was perfect: the smiling cigarette-man who was unfailingly cheerful about how cool it was for kids to smoke.

Mr. Butts crossed over from the comics to real life in 1994, when University of California tobacco researcher Dr. Stanton Glantz received a big Fedex box with the return address “Mr. Butts.” The box, as I reported in The Nation . . .
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The election day exit polls had some good news for Obama: voters don’t blame him for “current economic problems.” But the same poll also had some really bad news for him.
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