You're going to see a lot of this, unfortunately. McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers couldn't manage a comment on Obama's shift on Iraq without attacking his patriotism. Here is Rogers in the New York Times: There is nothing wrong with changing your mind when the facts on the ground dictate it. Indeed, the facts have changed because of the success of the surge that John McCain advocated for years and Barack Obama opposed in a position that put politics ahead of country. That last bit is so a... More ...

No great claims for this video, but there are more fireworks here than you're likely to see in the rain tonight. Danvers traditionally has the most spectacular fireworks display on the North Shore, and last night was no exception. ... More ...

Why am I posting the most overplayed clip in American political history? Because Paul Krugman today writes in the New York Times, "Howard Dean didn't scream." Krugman adds: "Again and again we've had media firestorms over supposedly revealing incidents that never actually took place." Yes, we have. And I can go along with his other examples: Krugman correctly points out that Al Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet, Hillary Clinton did not say she was continuing to campaign because Ba... More ...

Is it just me, or do the Fox News Channel's recent missteps strike you as qualitatively different from what has come before? It's as though your eccentric uncle has finally gone off the deep end, his uncertain grounding in reality having given way to something else entirely. The latest, as you may have heard, is that Fox altered photos of two New York Times reporters to make them appear more sinister, elongating their faces, yellowing their teeth and giving one of them a receding hairline. That ... More ...

It's tech week at Media Nation. Fresh from foisting my video issues on you, I thought I'd give an update on my ongoing efforts to make Gmail dance to my tune. Taking some excellent advice from a few astute readers, I set up Apple Mail to engage in two-way communication with Gmail via IMAP. As promised, this proved to be a far better set-up than accessing Gmail via POP. With IMAP, Apple Mail is more or less in constant contact with Gmail, syncing messages and folders so that what's on my hard dri... More ...

I've re-uploaded my fair-use video to fix the whopper of a typo that Donna Halper found. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of Steve Garfield and John Farrell, the quality is the same. I did apply some custom settings when creating a QuickTime file, and it looked terrific on my MacBook. But YouTube didn't like the file, playing the audio without any trouble but presenting the video as a series of stills. ... More ...

I considered letting this go, but figured some readers might wonder why I was taking a pass on the Manny Ramírez situation. Assuming Ramírez behaved as has been described — shoving traveling secretary Jack McCormick to the ground, or hard enough that McCormick fell — then he should have been suspended without pay for three games. It's really not a hard call. And I don't like it that Terry Francona and Theo Epstein appear to be more worried that Ramírez would go south on them for a month t... More ...

How much are you willing to pay for high-quality coverage of your community? Our local weekly costs $46 a year for a mail subscription. The local daily costs $4 a week, with tip. So we're paying more than $250 a year. But what if we were talking about a free community Web site? If the site had a chance to hire a journalist, would you be willing to contribute, say, $50 or $100 a year, even if you could still access it for free if you chose? It works for public radio. Why not for online local news... More ...

Yes, state Sen. Jim Marzilli, D-Arlington, should resign, and I suspect he will now that he's been indicted on charges that he sexually accosted four women in Lowell on June 3. But this effort by the Massachusetts Republican Party to push Marzilli out the door is cheap and sleazy. It's unworthy of a major political party, which, of course, the state GOP isn't. ... More ...

Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham does an exceptionally good job of framing the questions over the death of David Woodman, the reveler who stopped breathing while in police custody following the Celtics' victory, and who died over the weekend. As Abraham points out, there is a lot we don't know. Which means that Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis' approach — announcing there was no excessive force even before the investigation gets under way — is wrong. File away Shelley Murphy and Chri... More ...

In my latest for The Guardian, I take a look at the unfavorable political landscape that Barack Obama will have to traverse this fall: the very public trial of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; heightened tensions, and possibly war, with Iran; and a determination on the part of the Bush White House once again to use terrorism as a cudgel with which to bludgeon the Democrats. ... More ...

Narco News founder and former Boston Phoenix political reporter Al Giordano is involved in a nasty dispute with a Web site called RuralVotes.com. Earlier this year, Giordano was blogging the primaries on a RuralVotes page called The Field (see this and this). But recently, claiming censorship, he took it down and moved it to his own site. Now he wants the credentials to the Democratic National Convention that had been awarded to The Field when it was based at RuralVotes, claiming — with quite ... More ...

Check out my first news video — a discussion of the copyright dispute between the Associated Press and the Drudge Retort, featuring Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association, and Rob Bertsche, a First Amendment lawyer with the Boston firm of Prince, Lobel, Glovsky & Tye. Cox's blog post on the subject is very different from what you may have read elsewhere. As he was a close participant in the dust-up, you should read it. Cox and Bertsche engaged in a wide-ranging overview at... More ...

Did you know that Republican congressional candidate Nathan Bech wants U.S. Rep. John Olver to save the planet by not sending mail to constituents who don't want it? Or that Watertown councilor Jonathan Hecht is running hard for a state rep's seat? Or that former Ted Kennedy aide Melody Barnes has signed on with Barack Obama's presidential campaign? These are just a few of the tidbits you can glean at PolitickerMA.com, which slipped quietly into view in mid-June. The goal of the Politicker proje... More ...

As I vowed, I've started experimenting with different mail systems. Right now I'm playing with Apple Mail, Gmail and IMAP. Unfortunately, I've found that when I send a message using my Northeastern address, the receiver still has my Gmail address sprinkled throughout the header, since I'm using the Gmail SMTP server. So there's still a good chance that some of my intended recipients will see my messages as spam. Hmmm. ... More ...

I'll be doing my semi-regular turn on "Beat the Press" today at 7 p.m. (WGBH-TV, Channel 2). Among our topics, not surprisingly, is the Time magazine report on the alleged Gloucester "pregnancy pact." ... More ...

Gloucester High School principal Joseph Sullivan deserves a lot of credit for (more or less) standing by his words and standing up to Mayor Carolyn Kirk. But his statement, published yesterday in the Gloucester Daily Times, clarifies nothing, and leaves the story exactly where it stood on March 7, when the local paper first reported Sullivan's concern that some of his students were getting pregnant deliberately. Of course, that hasn't stopped the media from wrongly proclaiming that Sullivan is c... More ...

Please have a look at The Phoenix's annual Muzzle Awards, a Fourth of July roundup of local anti-constitutionalism that I've been writing since 1998. You'll see why Nat Hentoff likes to say that the human sex drive is exceeded only by the urge to censor. Among those who get singled out are Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, whose agencies have banned a respected academic, Adam Habib, from the United States. Habib is scheduled to appear at an ... More ...

A Media Nation reader thinks I should note that a restraining order taken out against Shawn Hendricks, head of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribal council, has been dropped. Fair enough. But I think I should also note that, according to this Cape Cod Times story, Hendricks has admitted to using steroids; to engaging in some sort of "a tug-of-war battle" over his son; and to "smashing his arm through a glass door during a fight with his wife." Glad I could clear that up. ... More ...

Gloucester Times reporter Patrick Anderson pours more water on the "pregnancy pact" fire. By the way ... sorry for the InstaPundit-style one-liners. I'm not really around today, but caught this and thought it was worth sharing. ... More ...