Questions that should be asked Friday

Nieman Watchdog (a journalism support group) has a list of “Some questions worth asking at the town-hall style presidential debate Friday in St. Louis.” It’s a good list.

Link via Dan Froomkin.

So, do you suppose …

Saddam Hussein will get the Nobel Peace Prize for his disarmament-related program activities during the 1990s?

Hyperbole

From the Gallup Independent Monday:

U.S. Interior Department Secretary Gale Norton was characterized Monday as a 21st Century reincarnation of 19th Century U.S. Army Gen. George Armstrong Custer.

The comparison came during the latest update [at the Navajo Nageezi Chapter House] of the largest class action lawsuit in American history. …

Lead lawyer Dennis Gingold told a reporter, “She’s worse (than Custer) and should be given the same treatment.” …

Gingold predicted, “We know the government will violate the injunction,” saying the court can then take the trust operation away from the administration and put it into a receivership.

This would be Norton’s Little Bighorn, as the department would lose control of Indian trust functions.

The Costanza Trap

Many think VP Burns Cheney did a slow fade as the debate proceeded Tuesday night. James Wolcott knows why:

Seinfeld scholars will remember the episode in which Elaine hired Jerry’s father for a job a J. Peterman, much to her regret. He didn’t know how to get rid of him without actually firing him. Do what I do at the Yankees, George advised. Schedule meetings late in the afternoon. These guys get up at dawn and by lunch they’re completely wiped. Elaine followed George’s counsel, and Jerry’s father had a conniption fit at the first meeting that dragged all the way past 5 PM.

I think we saw that last night. Cheney, like everyone else in the Bush White House, gets up at birdless dawn and by early evening shows unmistakable signs of testiness and snappishness. He had one good early round in last night’s debate, but faded long before the finish….

Debate this!

From The Donkey via Sideshow.

More Sherman Alexie

After all, Lewis and Clark’s story has never been just the triumphant tale of two white men, no matter what the white historians might need to believe. Sacagawea was not the primary hero of this story either, no matter what the Native American historians and I might want to believe. The story of Lewis and Clark is also the story of the approximately 45 nameless and faceless first- and second-generation European Americans who joined the journey, then left or completed it, often without monetary or historical compensation. Considering the time and place, I imagine those 45 were illiterate, low-skilled laborers subject to managerial whims and 19th century downsizing. And it is most certainly the story of the black slave York, who also cast votes during this allegedly democratic adventure. It’s even the story of Seaman, the domesticated Newfoundland dog who must have been a welcome and friendly presence and who survived the risk of becoming supper during one lean time or another. The Lewis and Clark Expedition was exactly the kind of multicultural, trigenerational, bigendered, animal-friendly, government-supported, partly French-Canadian project that should rightly be celebrated by liberals and castigated by conservatives.

Excerpted from What Sacagawea Means to Me by Sherman Alexie for Time (2002).

The whole essay is well-worth reading.

Novelist, poet, story teller and screenwriter …

Sherman Alexie was born on this date in 1966. Alexie’s father is a Coeur d’Alene Indian and his mother is a Spokane Indian

The Writer’s Almanac has quite a bit about Alexie concluding with:

His first big success was his collection of short stories The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993). It was one of the first works of fiction to portray Indians as modern Americans who watch all the same TV programs and eat the same breakfast cereal as everybody else. He has since written about Indians who are gay intellectuals, basketball players, middle-class journalists, elderly movie extras, rock musicians, construction workers, or reservation girls whose cars only go in reverse because all the other gears are broken. His most recent is the story collection Ten Little Indians, which came out last year.

Sherman Alexie said, “All too often, Indian writers write about the kind of Indian they wish they were. So I try to write about the kind of Indian I am. I’m just as much a product of ‘The Brady Bunch’ as I am of my grandmother.”

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven was adapted for the excellent and amusing film Smoke Signals.

Cornell University …

welcomed its first students on this date in 1868.