My walk was the walk of a human child, but my heart was a tree.

Tanenbaum says: Glenn Greenwald hit the nail on the head yesterday with a column on political reporting. The column was stimulated by the admission of Politico's editor in chief that all he cares about is more traffic to his site. If ignoring real news and running eight stories on John Edwards' haircut gets more traffic, that's the road they travel there. Greenwald suspects that practically all the news organizations work that way. This is why completely irrelevant "stories" dominate the news (like Barack Obama's remark about working people clinging to religion or Hillary Clinton's observation that Bobby Kennedy was killed after a June primary, both of which were off-hand comments made to private groups). In contrast, "unimportant" stories, like a side-by-side comparison of the health plans proposed by Clinton, Obama, and McCain never see the light of day. Maybe this is why the public rates the press lower than local, state, and federal government, business, educational and religious organizations, the supreme court, the medical establishment, and the military (Greenwald has a chart). Case in point: our lead story yesterday (Bob Barr's nomination on the Libertarian ticket, which could flip several states in November), didn't even make the front page of the Washington Post, NY Times, LA Times, USA Today, or the San Francisco Chronicle.

I just posted a story about politics, and a salmonbot said to me, "The government owns people, and can morally make arbitrary restrictions upon them". Good grief, they're getting cleverer.