The War's been leading the hourly news today since 9:30: 14 more Iraq War Dead in the last 48 hours. Operation Arrowhead Ripper, indeed:
US Military: 14 Troops Killed in 2 Days
The U.S. military said 14 American troops have died in several attacks in the past 48 hours, including five slain Thursday in a single roadside bombing that also killed four Iraqis in Baghdad.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ?SITE=PAPIT&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=home.htm
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Some of the things I've read this morning:
On the Roberts court from the LA Times:
High court has been good for business
...In February, for example, the court threw out an $80-million punitive damage verdict against cigarette maker Philip Morris, ruling that juries cannot use a single victim’s suit to punish a company for harm done by its products to thousands of others.
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On the stem-cell veto from the NY Times:
Mr. Bush’s Stem Cell Diversion
...Mr. Bush vetoed...because it would involve the destruction of microscopic entities — smaller than the period at the end of this sentence — that the president deems a nascent form of life.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/21/opinion/21thu1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
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And this, which sums it my complex feelings about today's news media by Leonard Pitts Jr., who is a really good writer:
Welcome to "The News Show"
..."The News Show" is predicated on news as entertainment, news as story arc, news as show complete with theme music and cool graphics, news as everything except, you know ... news.
Notice how importance never enters into the equation. Notice how there isn't even a pretense to public interest. TV "news" has become celebrity trials and runaway brides, missing girls and sex — while foreign bureaus are closing and news budgets are shrinking and we become a people ever more thoroughly entertained than informed, even as we live through the most dangerous days in recent history.
How high a price will we pay for that luxury? As Al Gore puts it in his book, "The Assault on Reason": "The subjugation of news by entertainment seriously harms our democracy: It leads to dysfunctional journalism that fails to inform the people. And when the people are not informed, they cannot hold government accountable when it is incompetent, corrupt or both."
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2003755835_pitts21.html
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