A New Facebook Page

As a writer and Staff member to “New-Life” in Glendale, Ca.,I would like to extend my deep appreciation for an article-“On the Ground” you have written so rarely seen nowadays in news medias. It is concise and well documented. We need individuals like you who know the difference between right and fact. What may seem right to many people, is a form of self-inflicted belief,an everlasting ignorance, that corrodes the society in which they live. We have that society now.K M.

Good luck with the newer level of sharing of ideas. it should be interesting to see how the experiment goes.

RE: Your Sunday column about the war –
As we address the war these days it is not fashionable to speak of compassion for our fellow man, or the misery visited upon the lives of so many Americans and Iraqis touched and scarred by a wasteful behemoth war-effort.
It is far more acceptable to address economic indicators which may, or may not be palpable in our every day lives. However, as you capture our expenses in that war, at a rate of $5,000.00 per second, or a projected cumulative expense of $3 trillion, the economy of that war becomes obscenely palpable, betraying fundamental American values of compassion, frugality, and the deepest respect for the human condition; whether fashionable, or not to address.
John Kenneth Galbraith’s commentary on America’s wealth and disparities, evident in a post World War II period, remains as poignant today, as it did upon the first best selling print release of “The Affluent Society” in 1958.
We must care for America, now.
We as a people continued to elect a president, and a cabinet which adamantly deny the ruling realities of an eroding middle class; a burgeoning working poor, a warmer World, a slowing economy, and consistently fail to address the very principles which make me proud of being an American.
Our poor need help. Our professions are in trouble. Our cities, and states battle economic, natural and moral disasters at an astonishing daily and annual rate. I will not hawk here that it is the very duty of the Federal government to stretch an infrastructure to address our state and city-specific societal ills. But by God, why incapacitate us all by creating trillions of barriers which will disable us from exercising responsible options for years to come?
The war demons feed on the naïveté of those plump bottom bureaucrats who have never felt the rage and panic of the enemy’s hand closing in on the throat of a loved one; nor can they imagine the internal devastation of one who prepares to hunt and kill that enemy. With them and a docile Congress, it is all a rhetorical sound bite, with a carefully drafted voting record, engineered to protect incumbency.
Let’s stop this war now. Let’s grow flowers and other green things with the strength of warriors, seeking a better city and a better state. Why should we hide our contempt for violence? The war on terror begins at home. Bring gardens and homes to the homeless, and those patriotic men and women who gallantly gave their limbs, and their all. Relish millions upon their families, neighbors, and friends. Stop them from relinquishing their homes because they can’t pay a mortgage.
Let’s pay attention to the cancerous effects of a racially segregated society where the white rich has access to the best health care advancements ever imagined in the history of man, yet districts of Harlem still battle infant mortality rates which resemble those of a developing nation. Our justice system exists in an apartheid state; where the best legal representation is available to thieves and murderers who can afford it, but the toll of an overburdened legal system falls squarely on the shoulders of innocent, poor men and women who cannot afford anything other than a patchwork of hotly contested hours from ardently devout, but overworked public defenders. Or worse yet, those same poor people overcrowd prisons, and inhabit our death rows.
Are we ever going to be bold enough to brave the questions of our much less than perfect educational system? Or the fact that we insist on paying women no more than 75% of their male counterparts, performing the same function?
Let’s heroically take care of each other now, and the sizable challenges we face as a nation, united under one oath. Let’s declare a patriotic war on the enmities of our towns and our families.
Let’s fix our cities by caring about those who live and work there, using our public dollars to stimulate affordable housing. Let’s care for, and reward our public servants with a wage and benefit befitting the honor of their service. We can start with the surviving first responders to the World Trade Center, and we certainly can nurture all our veterans coming home, perhaps now facing a denigrating existence.
By the Grace of God and decency, let’s rally to fight this Good fight, and conquer all this now; instead of persisting on an impotent effort to legislate abroad what is so desperately needed at home!

Transparency through the minds of journalists and opinion writers is always a good thing. Another great social networking site that you should join is Shelfari.
//www.shelfari.com/
Personally, I like to know what people are reading. This way readers can see where you are coming from and what influences are driving your columns.

I recently joined Facebook but I have only one “friend”, my daughter, with whom I play Scrabulous. Would you like to become my “friend” and become my second Srabulous opponent. By the way, I am 80 years old.

It won’t be Senator Clintons fault; It will be the media’s fault. You all sat with your tounges wagging for Bushe’s war and now you have your tounges wagging over Senator Obama; I am not a Hillary lover but everynight all I hear on TV is how Senator Obama can do no wrong and the microscope is on Senator Clinton. Senator Obama does not have to say anything negative about our NY Senator because the media does it. The Chris Matthews show is now called the Obama Hour and the so called news hour that follows is even worse. The horror of this is you (the Media) is going to screw up the elections because you did not learn your mistakes from thre Iraq war coverage that your job is to report the news not twist it to your liking.

You wrote, “All that requires making the news business not just a top-down process or even a two-way street but a real community.”

This is a joke, right? The NY Times is deeply embedded with the permanent government, as the career of Leslie Gelb would demonstrate. The reason that blogs emerged is that people felt alienated by the incestuous relationship between the government and the press. A real community has to be built on the basis of equality. When Timesmen cut their ties with the big businessmen and politicians that run the country, then maybe we can talk about community. Until then, we have the same relationship to your paper that Soviet citizens once had to Pravda. I guess the Times is more valuable because it has good items on where to buy chocolate, etc.

I fervently hope more people will read this blog and hear Jorge Abreu’s (#6) plea to all of us to rouse ourselves from sleep, and return to reason, vigilance and intelligent analysis of our own affairs and not let anyone -least of all people we elect to serve us, rob us of our humanity again.

As a writer of my blog Theblackmansview I have seen things in the last 40s year that is being us to our knee for reason that we see every day in our life and it should not be this way. We the peoples are up to to our head with all the problem’s that we are facing the 2008’s year. We need to try do better for what we let get out of hand, the cost of living, the war, housing, jobs, there is a way and we need to take that road to get our peoples back where we were before 9-11-2001, make God help us.

floor 12 is right.

There is something very wrong with the media. Even Mr. Kristof here is becoming so obviously biased againt Hillary.

There is something very wired. I just read today that Obama’s middle name isHussein!

I listen to NPR almost everyday but I have never heard people call his full name. Call me a racist, but I don’t think America is ready to elect a Hussein to the white house. America just invaded a country for somebody named Hussein. And how many terrorists are named Hussein?

And why is it nobody called Obama his full name. I hear people calling Hillary Rodom Client all the time.

And how does the media censorship work? If the big media like NY times don’t call Obama as Hussein, then others follow the suite and shut up as well, like in the case of Hussein of WMD?

Since NY times won’t call Obama by his full name, let spell out right here:

Barak Hussein Obama.

As a Columbia journalism school graduate who left the business after five years to become a teacher, I agree that the journalism’s business model is changing. We seem to have large numbers of jobs that require little more than rewriting press releases or wire copy because reporting positions have disappeared.

And yet there are millions of people who live the daily experiences that reporters, as observers, try to capture on the page; Today these people are all a mouse click away from submitting their own stories– desciptions, opinions, photos, or just a first-person quote– online. Many reporters are doing their research this way already.

I spent a few years running a web site for teens around the world and it was fascinating to read their debates on smoking, teen pregnancy, politics, etc … as well as their first-person stories from their home countries. It provided an immediacy and variety impossible to recreate as a reporter.

The downside of turning news into a collective enterprise, of course, is credibility but many media outlets have abandoned that anyway– they merely report both sides and let readers make up their minds without trying to determine which side is actually right. For many years every story on climate change had to include a denial from a so-called expert in an Exxon-funded ‘think’ tank.

Can random contributors be any less biased, and won’t the open marketplace of ideas thus created weed them out as Wikipedia does? So why not just step back and let the two sides tell their own stories, with the help of an editor to organize it, correct blatant errors, supply useful facts, etc.

The writing will be less formulaic, the copy will come a lot cheaper, and readers are not just commenting on a story but helping to create it. Which is not to say that such a new model would be any better than the old, just that if the old model is vanishing anyway, it’s a promising alternative.

There is no shortage of suffering.

There is no shortage of people who see injustice, and feel helpless to make a difference.

I am concerned that communications – like this messageboard – seem to become hotbeds for venom, rather than platforms for thoughtful exchanges of ideas.

Perhaps you should check out Dell Ideastorm (www.dellideastorm.com) as a model. Tell a story, challenge your readership to come up with ideas that make a difference, and the top vote-getter gets to go with you on a future visit to that region to start implementing that idea.