Thursday, March 23, 2006

Guest-hosting this week

I am filling in for the next few days at the Chequer board of Nights and Days group blog while one of their bloggers is on vacation. It will mostly be tax policy stuff like at the work blog, seeing what time of year it is, but with fewer constraints. I'm excited that I'll get to inflict my thoughts on a new audience.

I tried to post to the 50265 blog this morning, but the photo upload failed. I hope Blogger soon gets rid of the gremlins that have plagued it. I know it's free, but I hate losing the time spent on a failed post. I may move the operation to the dormant Kristans.org. site after tax season.

Friday, March 17, 2006

50265 problems

Fans of the 50265 Blog: I haven't taken it down. Blogger is buggered for some reason. I hope they figure it out; apparently they have a bad "filer," whatever that is.

Fans of Joesaysso: sorry the posting has been nonexistent. Tax season and all that. I've things to say, just not enough time to say it right now.

Sunday, March 05, 2006

The Newspaper Iowa Depends Upon

For Judge Parker, anyway.

You wouldn't know this from today's paper, but Iowa's Democrats held caucuses yesterday. In Iowas largest county, the current governor's annointed successor failed to attract enough support to even have his votes counted, while upstart Ed Fallon's shoestring operation defeated the prosperous Culver campaign. Bacon has some details.

The Register's editorial staff couldn't squeeze this into today's paper. Yes, the lead story on slot machines deserves front page coverage (and they deserve kudos for pursuing this issue). Sure, they always put their big feature on page 1 on Sundays (Black people in Charles City!). But the other stories on the front page - Iowa has murky rivers, and maybe Pat Tillman's friendly fire death was a negligent homicide, rather than an accident - that's hardly stop-the-presses stuff. I don't need the NIDU to tell me the Raccoon River is brown.

Surely, though, the Fallon win would be on the front of the "Metro and Iowa" section, no? No. We instead learn that a bunch of bills proposed in the legislature won't pass this year - (like they all do in other years?) and that there was an anti-diabetes fund raiser and a telethon yesterday.

As far as I can tell, there isn't a single line in today's paper on the Fallon caucus victory, and Blouin's shockingly bad showing. There's no excuse for this. They can't say that it happened too late in the day to cover, as they had no trouble getting in last night's basketball results from Boulder and St. Louis. It's either incredibly bad news judgment or a bullheaded refusal to do anything to cover the Fallon campaign. I suppose it could even be both.

While I think Fallon is by far the best candidate the Democrats have, I'm unlikely to vote for him in November. When campaigns complain about press coverage, my instinct is always that it's sour grapes. But this is really bad, and the Fallon campaign has every right to be irate.

But we can still depend on the Register for Judge Parker.