Lies Rupert Murdoch Told Me

This free Wall Street Journal keeps coming to my house. Fuck! I want to stop reading it, but I can't seem to bring myself to just toss it in the garbage and I don't have a bird or a house-training puppy.

But here's the thing: I tried reading the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times, and they are just awful. People say the Tribune is a conservative paper, at least on the editorial pages, but it's less conservative than simply hateful in the same low-key, passive-aggressive way I've found midwesterners in general to be. The Trib is like the big guy standing behind you in a checkout line: won't say anything directly to you about what an asshole he thinks you appear to be, but he'll keep bumping your cart with his, "accidentally," and if given half the chance he'd run you over with his car and keep going, smiling big. That's Chicago's flagship newspaper, an overstuffed, underwritten, contemptuous, brooding heap, that gets called "conservative" by those who mistake haughty poses for something else.

The Sun-Times is a paper that just wants to be liked as much as USA Today, but is not as well written.

In comparison to those two, the Wall Street Journal has everything on its side. Most of the content slants right, but just about all of it also starts off with facts and ends up as snapshots of actual, meaningful things. No wonder MBAs think they have a better read on society than smart people do--when all you read is reporting on business and politics, life looks pretty simple.

By the way (and since there's no ending for this post), did you know that the only currencies the dollar is gaining against are the UK pound (which is still worth almost $2), the Turkish lira (up 6.3%!), the South African rand (12.1%), the Thai baht, the Vietnamese dong (up, up, up! down...), South Korean wong, and the rupees of both India and Pakistan. Everything else, we're down. Guess which world currencies are the strongest against the dollar? The dinar of Bahrain = $2.65 and the dinar of Kuwait = $3.75. What do you think that means?