by Walter Brasch In May 2004, the New York Times, while claiming it was aggressive in pursuing stories about the Bush–Cheney Administration, slipped in an apology for acting more as the mouthpiece for politicians than as a watchdog for society. “Coverage was not as rigorous as it should have bee...

PART 1 The president of the Associated Press (AP) was spewing venom at the Bush–Cheney administration for having turned the Department of Defense into a propaganda machine. Americans “expect honest answers about what’s happening to their sons and daughters,� Tom Curley told journalism studen...

by Walter Brasch The chairman of the Republican National Committee may have begun an irreversible descent into a future as a fear-bound paranoid victim of functional amnesia, possibly caused by a hysterical post-traumatic event such as the overwhelming victory of Democrats in the 2008 election and t...

by Walter Brasch During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama was called mentally unstable; his supporters were called unpatriotic. At Sarah Palin rallies, in newspaper letters-to-the-editor, on conservative radio and TV talk shows, supporters spewed hatreds, resorting to the Bush tactics of fear ...

Wearing a pith helmet and brandishing a blunderbuss, Marshbaum burst into my office and ordered me to the floor. I looked at my faux friend and media foil, about to ask him what his latest scheme was. With Marshbaum, who was fed “Honeymooners� episodes by IV when he was a child, everything is a ...

Dave Comroe stepped to the firing line, raised his 12-gauge Browning over and under shotgun, aimed and fired. Before him, a pigeon fell, moments after being released from a box less than 20 yards away. About 25 times that day Comroe fired, hitting about three-fourths of the birds. He was 16 at the t...

There should have been absolutely no controversy in a resolution presented in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives this past week. Speaker Dennis O’Brien, a Republican from Philadelphia, wanted to honor the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, which was holding its 60th annual national convention in H...

The mantra of almost all conservatives—it makes no difference what political party they belong to—is to keep government out of their lives. But, they don’t mind government interference when it plays to their biases and bigotry. For example, it’s perfectly acceptable for the government to ent...

From a pool of about seven billion, those hard-working geniuses at People magazine have managed to find the hundred most beautiful people in the whole wide world. And—get ready for the surprise—almost every one of those beautiful people are rich American celebrities. For almost two decades, Peop...