It’s a dreary, rainy night here at the FDL safe-house.  Ned the Fighting Koi is swimming happily in his bowl on the desk and all is quiet except for the sound of the rain on the roof.  Nights like this, sometimes, you know these satin sheets can feel so cold, and this big bed seems [...]

The Labor Day holiday has passed — for those who still have paid holidays. The Census Department just report that says 23% of private-sector employees don’t get paid holidays, and only 48% of those in service sector do. For most newspapers and pundits, Labor Day is all about falling real wages, the loss of health [...]

  Fifteen minutes before ABC convened a conference call about “The Path to 9/11,” I finally got an email answer to my request to be allowed on the group media call with 9/11 Commission Co-Chair, Thomas Kean. I’d only been requesting this reply since…Friday. Here’s what I got back from Jonathan Hogan: Hi there,  We [...]

People were making excellent use of the "Spotlight" project this morning to contact media outlets and express their concerns over the wingnut hit piece that ABC is about to relase, to quote Digby, without commercials as a "gift to the Repubican party" in an election year. Mark Steckel, who runs the Spotlight Project, offers this [...]

(Photo by Danfung Dennis for The New York Times.  Gorgeous color in this shot.) As the anniversary of 9/11 approaches, it is worth asking some five years after the fact, whether we are using our resources to most effectively make America more safe, to lower the threats posed to our great nation — or are we [...]

(Graphic of "a handy map showing how far median incomes have dropped over the past six years" from The Washington Monthly, courtesy of the Detroit Free Press.) In the 2004 election cycle, one of the most effective stump speech segments that I heard came from John Edwards — the story of he and his parents sat at their kitchen [...]

(Don’t forget — you can spread the word to journalists about this using the Spotlight function, located at the bottom of every post or here — JH) ABC is clearly feeling some heat over their fictionalized drama, “The Path to 9/11,” set to air on September 10th and 11th. After pulling the public blog from [...]

Can someone explain to me how, exactly, ABC thinks that marketing a fictional docudrama about 9/11 through the scintillating stylings of Hugh Hewitt is going to get them over the ratings hump against Monday Night Football on ESPN?  As Sheldon said here yesterday: If the goal were simply to inform the public, however, ABC would have [...]