CNN has an interesting story by a CNNU correspondent at Brigham Young University. It’s an intriguing profile on students in Utah, the only state where it’s legal for licensed students and professors to carry a weapon on public campuses.
A sampling:
“Nick, who asked not to be fully identified so his fellow students wouldn't know he carried a gun, says he has had a concealed weapons permit for more than three years. But it was Seung-Hui Cho's murderous campus rampage that made him take a gun to class.
‘Last year, after Virginia Tech, I thought “I'm not going to be a victim,”’ Nick said.
‘My first thought was “how tragic.” But then I couldn't help but think it could've been different if they'd allowed the students the right to protect themselves.’”
The article serves as substantive debate between gun control and the right to bear arms. What do you think?
The biggest scandal from last night’s Democratic presidential debate has nothing to do with driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, universal healthcare or Pakistan.
Instead, everybody’s talking about Maria Luisa, the student who used the debate’s precious final question to ask Hillary Clinton if she prefers pearls or diamonds:
This is obviously a ridiculous question—but turns out it wasn’t the one Maria wanted to ask. Several of the questions she submitted to CNN were approved, and she was going to ask Clinton about the Yucca Mountain Repository, but CNN employees chose the diamonds/pearls question and pressured her to ask it to close the debate.
So even though she submitted the dumb question, at least Maria had her priorities in order until CNN got its claws in her. And I have to say, her self-defense message on MySpace is a pretty bad-ass takedown of CNN:
See, the media chose what they wanted, not what the people or audience really wanted. That's politics; that's reality. So, if you want to read about real issues important to America--and the whole world, I suggest you pick up a copy of the Economist or the New York Times or some other independent source. If you want me to explain to you how the media works, I am more than happy to do so. But do not judge me or my integrity based on that question.
Nothing on Iraq anywhere on the page. Probably because there are no rich bachelors getting eaten by alligators as they attempt to commit robberies there.
Today MySpace and MTV announced the details of the presidential candidate forums they will hold this fall. Hosted on college campuses across the country, broadcast on MTV and streamed live on MySpace, the forums seek to foster “candid, unfiltered” discussions between young voters and the major Republican and Democratic candidates.
As I write in an identical blog post at HuffPo, the blogosphere seems abuzz with optimism about the forums, the latest evidence that 2008 won’t be your mother and father’s election. “MTV and MySpace have hit up an interactive format with the potential to pioneer a whole new way of doing candidate debates/forums,” writes Michael Connery, co-founder of Future Majority, a prominent blog with well-done reporting on progressive youth politics. (Yes, that Mike Connery who came at Campus Progress back in June.)
The last time Dick Cheney went on Larry King Live he proclaimed the insurgency in Iraq was in “last throes,” so when I heard the veep would be back for another interview tonight, I got my popcorn out and prepared for some entertaining lies and high-quality misleading of the public.
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