Not everyone is happy, but I like the idea of being able to watch television with my nine-year-old, and two-year-old, without fearing they’ll be exposed to something they shouldn’t be yet seeing.

It seems our culture’s voracious appetite for extreme images isn’t going to wane anytime soon. Whether it’s dead bodies, multilation, or sexual activity, it’s not making us a better, gentler, people. It’s fascinating to me how the US sometimes appears to be moving back toward morals and decency, while the rest of the world swings even further away.

In the end, I wonder who will be left standing?

~Jason

Comparing U.S. President George Bush with Winston Churchill may seem a stretch. Yet there’s a parallel — not with Churchill of the war years, when he was the “free” world’s most admired leader, but with Churchill of the 1930s when he stood alone, warning about the rise of Nazism.

Then, pacifism was rampant in Britain and Europe. Hitler’s aggression was rationalized by wishful thinking. Peace at any price.

Except for Churchill. He began warning that the Nazis must be stopped when they occupied the Rhineland in 1936. He urged an alliance of Britain, France and the Soviet Union to stop Hitler’s expansion. He was called a warmonger, an enemy of peace, reviled in print and in speeches. Few stood with him.

History has proven Churchill right.

With the U.S. election entering the home stretch, Bush is under the same sort of attacks for his war on terrorism and Iraq that Churchill endured before WWII.

Good comments on this page too.

~Jason

…Gallup’s respondents said that Kerry “did the better job in the debate” by a decisive 53% to 37% margin. But if you look at the internal numbers, they give Kerry very little comfort. The only area where people actually say Kerry did better was in “expressing himself more clearly,” by 60% to 32%. The candidates were tied in having a good understanding of the issues. By 49% to 46%, respondents said Bush “agrees with them on the issues they care about.” By 50% to 45%, Bush was more believable; by 48% to 41%, Bush was more likable; and by a whopping 54% to 37%, Bush demonstrated he was “tough enough for the job.”

Equally important, the Gallup poll indicates that watching the debate had almost no effect on respondents’ assessment of who can best handle the situation in Iraq (Bush, by 54% to 43% post-debate) or who would be the better commander in chief (Bush, by 54% to 44% post-debate).

So unless the media succeed in spinning the “Kerry won” story so that it takes on a life of its own, it looks like the debate advanced Kerry’s cause little, if at all. [Powerline] (emphasis mine)

This is fascinating to me.

~Jason

During a week that CBS was fined $550,000 for Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl flash and its news division had to apologize for shoddy reporting, at least the prime-time ratings gave its executives something to smile about.

~Jason