Major League Baseball umpires get four weeks of paid vacation every summer. They don't actually shout "Play ball!" before games. And a tie does not, to my dismay, go to the runner. So reports my friend Bruce Weber , a New York Times staff writer and author of " As They See ...

Back when Fox executives were high-fiving each other for deciding to turn "American Idol's" traditional top 12 finalists into the top 13 finalists -- to really shake things up on the singing competition -- no one thought to send a memo to the Senior Executive Vice President for Reality Series Viewer...

I spent much of last fall at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government as a Fellow at the Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics and Public Policy. While there, I researched issues related to journalism, trust and credibility – and in particular what role emerging social media might play in add...

By Traci Lepore Published: March 9, 2009 When it comes to modern theater, stage directions—the descriptive text that appears within brackets in a script—are an important piece of the puzzle. They speak for the playwright when he is not there. They provide details about how the playwright has ima...

 The dirty little secret … is that every Republican in this country wants [President Barack] Obama to fail, but none of them have the guts to say so. I am willing to say it. We want him to fail because we want to preserve our country as we found it. We do not want to see a successful attack o...

That's the title of Jay Winkler's latest message.  He's the General Secretary of the United Methodist Chuch General Board of Church & Society.  LINK I have led hundreds of workshops on The United Methodist Church’s Social Principles during the past 20 years. I realized ...

3/7/2009 – Michigan 67, Minnesota 64 – 19-12, 9-9 Big Ten   One of the bizarre things I love is soccer, and one of the bizarre things about soccer I love is the weird British permutations of American sports lingo that get deployed during the course of same and the bizarre permutation I love...

Mattera rules! He best represents the future of the great American leadership, I tell you. Jason Mattera, who has exposed that fat bastard Jack Murtha , John Kerry,  William “Cold Cashâ€� Jefferson in a truth ambush - catches criminal non-parallel Charles Rangel in an uncharacteristically ca...

By Representative Nick Kahl (D-Rockwood). In Jeffrey Jeremy Wright’s post, “Why progressives should support the MLS to PDX proposal,� he supposed that to challenge the use of urban renewal dollars in this instance is to challenge the validity of urban renewal itself. Well, I am offering a chal...

Welcome to our weekly roundup here at “5 Minutes Around the Blogosphere”. As you know, you can come back all week and add a post or giveaway to our Mister Linky. Be sure to check back often, as new links will be added daily. You don’t want to miss out on something fun. ANNOUNCEMENT...