Trouble in the twin cities - police have arrested, detained, and harassed many independent journalists covering the protest on the RNC, including Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now! You can read more about what happened here and here.

 Free Press has just put out an action alert urging people to take action:

Stop the Arrests of Journalists. Sign the Letter.
Police in St. Paul arrested several journalists during protests of the Republican National Convention, including Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and an AP photographer as they were covering the demonstrations. Police also raided a meeting of the video journalists' group I-Witness with firearms drawn to arrest independent media, bloggers and videomakers. Arresting and detaining journalists for doing their jobs is a gross violation of free speech and freedom of the press. Journalists must be free to do their jobs without intimidation. Please click here to demand that press intimidation in the twin cities ceases immediately, and that charges against the arrested journalists are dropped.

Check out more action alerts here!

"Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans," I have written, "but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy's sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life."

Recently Rachael Ray and Dunkin' Donuts have both come under fire for an advertisement featuring the TV host in what is allegedly a keffiyeh.

To say that this argument is nothing more than nonsensical xenophobia and Arab mongering would be an understatement.

This is the top headline on the frontpage of the CNN website:

Screened at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival Jackie Salloum's 9 minute short, "Planet of the Arabs" is a montage of the dehumanizing and vilifying depictions of Arabs in contemporary American film.

Planet of the Arabs

Check out this chart from Nielsen, a market research company that monitors television viewer and web user habits. They also survey users for demographic info like political ideology—below (click to enlarge), they display the constituency of popular political and news sites by the percentage of readers who identify as liberal or very liberal (in blue) and readers who identify as conservative, moderate or undeclared (in red).

It's hard to draw conclusions from the results, though, with readers divided up so shoddily. Lumping together moderate and undeclared readers with conservatives is decidedly unhelpful, and skews the chart considerably--on first glance, it appears that conservative readers dominate mainstream news sources, while liberals are sequestered on Mother Jones and The Nation.

So chances are I fall into the minority of blogger's at Campus Progress, not because I want to but because I have no choice.  Let's start with the basics, I dig the death penalty, doing something big with the immigration situation, stem-cell research, Dave Matthews and I think Anne Coulter is kinda hot.  I don't dig abortion, most gun control, people thinking they know what's actually goin on in Iraq myself included, people scaring other people about the environment, and spiders. 

So I got that goin for me, but I have to tell you I'm new to this concept of writing down what I think and hoping people care enough to read it.  Which reminds me of a blog I just read about how Fox News is infiltrating facebook. The first thing that came to my head was "who cares?" I mean, I just go on facebook to see if any of the dumb crap I did the weekend before made it onto someone's camera, but then I got to thinking and it led me to the first point I'm going to make in this new venture. As 18, 19, 20, 21, ... year old men and women, we swim in pools of bias.  Whether it be left, right, up, down or around, institutions of higher learning throughout the United States are shaping the political climate to come, not Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hanity or The New York Times.  Their incites are left primarily to the baby boomers and our parents who are over the proverbial hump.

Ninety-nine out of 100 of us are going to form our beliefs on politics and government as a function of the institutions that raise us, and maybe only 60 out of 100 are gonna care enough to do something.  I'm no angel and I may or may not fall within that 99 or 60, but it should be forums like this, conversations with each other, and finding out for ourselves that builds our beliefs and our characters and fights the biases we see and feel everyday.  I'm not sure, but I don't think I'm gonna loose any sleep when The LA Times puts a link up on doratheexplorer.com, but it does shake me up to see how much we swallow in class and around campuses, without really considering it fully.   Thanks for readin.

Helen Thomas, as the keynote speaker at the Women, Action & Media! conference, offered up a narrative of modern American history through her eyes. It's the underbelly of history, and she does a good job of making it pretty damn funny. She noted a hilarious story of Ford who said, If Helen Thomas had been around when God made the Earth, Thomas quoted, He could not have rested on the seventh day. He would have had to explain it to Helen Thomas.

But she also made some serious points. The president wanted to spread democracy, she said but "you don't do that with the barrel of a gun." Thomas called the war immoral, unnecessary, and wrong.

What's interesting is her read of history. According to Thomas, by comparison George H.W. Bush was more reasonable than the current Bush. She held John F. Kennedy and Linden B. Johnson up as models for modern Democrats -- save Johnson's decision to go to Vietnam. Her narrative of history was kind to some presidents, but her kindness came with criticism.

Thomas quoted Thomas Jefferson, who preferred newspapers to government. When one woman asked for advice for women who feel the urge to self-censor, Thomas asked, "What are you afraid of?" Thomas said she viewed presidents as public service, "I pay their salary."

Update: The following is cross-posted from my own blog.

In the United States, there's a large and growing problem of elites not serving in the military and, at the same time, the military becoming an institution dominated by the lower middle classes and by families who have a tradition of service.  Although America has lower social mobility and lots of hereditary wealth, in Britain, they have a real royal family.  But Britain's royals have a long tradition of military service.  Prince Andrew, Charles' brother, served as helicopters pilot in the Falklands. And Prince Harry, brother of Prince William and third-in-line to the throne, is serving in the British Army. 

Even though he's a royal, he's just a normal soldier and for the past ten weeks, he's been serving in Afghanistan.  But we didn't hear about until a few days ago, when the Drudge Report broke the story.  It turned out the British government got all the major media outlets in a room and requested that they not report that Harry was in Afghanistan, so he wouldn't endanger his fellow soldiers.  The embargo was broken and now Harry is probably going to the Persian Gulf.  But was it a good idea for the media to essentially be the lapdogs of the press?  I think so.

Recently MSNBC's David Shuster made a big no-no. While talking about Chelsea Clinton's role in her mother's campaign, he kinda-sorta called her a 'ho.

"Doesn't it seem like Chelsea's sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?"

Oops. Watch the clip here:

As you can imagine, a whole firestorm has come up out of this (click here to see what Media Matters has to say about it) 

I wrote a column for my school's newspaper, The GW Hatchet, in which I ask the question: Is the media pimping out politics?

There's still so much election coverage - I can't wait to see what comes out of these talking-heads' mouths in the months to come. Will Bill O'Reilly accidentally say the N-word? Will Lou Dobbs blame his chronic diarrhea on bad Mexican food that upset his stomach? 

And everyone in my office in East London, South Africa, chimes in about what they think Americans should care about. The general concensus is that Americans should care more about America and less about the rest of the world.

One girl brings up Katrina, and said how pathetic it is that America hasn't rebuilt New Orleans yet.

Another guy said that America's economy is going to collapse if we don't do something about it fast. "The whole bubble is going to burst," he said.

With the '08 election swamping headlines, the ongoing unrest in Burma has dropped from the public discourse, but the brutal violence has not stopped. 

According to The Guardian, the Burmese military, despite pledges to the UN, have continued to suppress acts of political dissent. The suppression has been widespread, totaling 96 arrests since November.

"Four months on from the violent crackdown on peaceful demonstrators, rather than stop its unlawful arrests the Myanmar [Burmese] government has actually accelerated them," said Catherine Baber, director of Amnesty International Asia-Pacific programme.

Most arrests were a result of Burmese residents trying to spread the message of the draconian crackdown, according to Amnesty.

After worldwide condemnation of the Burmese junta, the UN sent a broker to compromise a deal with the military. After promising the arrests would stop, Burma's rulers show little sign of change, The Gaurdian reports.

It’s Getting Hot in Here has a great post on how little global warming has been mentioned in the presidential debates. Apparently, out of 2,769 questions, only 3 were about global warming – the same number as were asked about UFOs.

Personally, I find the priorities of the US media are much more frightening than alien abduction.