On The Turning Away

April is the cruelest month,
breeding lilacs out of the dead land,
mixing memory and desire,
stirring dull roots with spring rain.
- T.S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)

Has anyone noticed that HuffPo’s PA results (Clinton 54, Obama 46) on its front page? However, if you click through, the numbers are not unlike those reported by other news organizations: with 99% precincts reporting, Clinton 55%, Obama 45%. If that seems too subliminal, they leave no doubt you’d catch the PA postmortem headline proclaiming McCain the winner.

Judging from the over-the-top reactions to Wednesday’s debate in Philadelphia, those Obama cheerleaders seem to be the bitter bunch - to casual observers at least. In some quarters vitriol is free-flowing, not the least because Obama’s now notorious “bitter” comments were revisited by ABC moderators.

Some at the Guardian even went so far as to take to task the blogger who broke the news, calling for “new rules”. As uberblogger Jeff Jarvis put it, “[n]ews is what happens and what people witness and what they can now share, with or without journalists.”

But those who decry the blogger and debate moderators would do no worse than examine their own thinking lest they’re guilty to the charge of double standards and worse yet, hypocrisy. Just a few months ago, when questions of media fairness were raised, some Guardian reporter superciliously dismissed it as non-issue, saying media is something each campaign “has to deal with it”.
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A quiet revolution, of the aqua sort, is underway in Manhattan’s high-end or green-conscious dining establishments. Soon, you’ll be paying $5 per glass for “homemade, specially treated sparkling water from the tap”. And bottled water, part of the “bottled water and tofu” Gore era emblem for Bobos, is fast becoming an environmental pariah. Who knew?

Bloomberg’s city hall is purportedly to have spent $700,000 on a PR campaign urging New Yorkers to drink from the tap, although New York City is among the 34 cities that haven’t tested their drinking water for drugs, or “trace pharmaceuticals”, as shown present in water providers in the 24 cities AP investigated last month.
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