* Whether it’s Doonesbury Classic and references to Vietnam and Iran or it’s the Sunday version riffing on the ironies of a failed Iraq policy, Gary Trudeau’s strip continues to belong on the editorial page–not with Beetle Bailey and Garfield.
* The Tampa Bay Times–via its aggressive, singular PolitiFact–is planning to live fact-check and annotate President Barack Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address as well as the GOP response. The Jan. 20 fact-checks, according to the Times, will be implemented through a live blog that will include video and text.
Now that’s ambitious. And labor intensive. And apparently a bit of a budget-buster. The result: PolitiFact is launching a “Kickstarter” campaign to raise $15,000 from the public to pay for it.
But the quid pro quo goes beyond knowing one has helped the Times sort out the truth in politics and deliver a rapid-fire, analytical journalism coup. Donors will also be eligible for a PolitiFact coffee mug and a limited edition “Pants on Fire” button. And for $100, donors will be allowed to pick a claim for fact-checking.
Call it an outside-of-the-box approach. Or even entrepreneurial chutzpah. But also call it another sign of the challenging, pragmatic, print-journalism times we live in.
* Media have been talking of a “fresh start” for Gov. Rick Scott. Sorry, but this is one pol who doesn’t deserve a reset button.
Not when there’s no reset on the $2.4 billion in federal dollars–that have gone elsewhere–that he turned down for high speed rail. Not when he still refuses to lobby for Medicaid expansion dollars for the nearly 1 million Floridians who are still uninsured. Not when he insultingly continues to perpetuate the con job of job creation that’s at blatant odds with his own 2010 campaign promises. Not when he’s added his clueless, ideological voice to those in the Cuban-exile community who resist overtures to finally end the counterproductive Cold War with Cuba.
And that’s for starters.
* Bubba the Love Sponge Clem is, alas, back. He held a press conference Monday morning in Tampa to formally announce the details of his return to the Tampa Bay airwaves. The lemmings always turn out.
* A new year always conjures thoughts of the passage of time. Remember when 1984 was George Orwell’s dystopian novel–and not an iconic date now 31 years in the past? Remember all the computer uncertainty associated with Y2K?
I looked at a newspaper headline on Christmas morning and couldn’t possibly conceive of something like this being reality just a few years back: “California Puzzles Over Safety Of Driverless Cars.” Actually, I still can’t conceive of it–let alone that it’s news that anyone, even now, would be “puzzled” over safety concerns.
* If change-of-venue doesn’t apply to the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, accused, as it were, in the Boston Marathon attacks, where would it ever apply?
* It turns out that the first college football playoff semifinals–Oregon-Florida State and Alabama-Ohio State–drew the two largest audiences in cable TV history. Both averaged more than 28 million viewers.