The Second Amendment doesn’t give anyone the right to own guns, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said today.

The creator does, he said.

In town to address the NRA’s annual meeting at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Downtown, Gingrich told Tribune-Review editors and reporters that rights enshrined in the Constitution come from God, and that the country’s founding charter merely prohibits government from abridging them.

“You’re personally sovereign and you loan power to the state, which is fundamentally different than the European model,” said Gingrich, who said he is likely to announce his campaign for president in the next week or two.

Is it me, or are the paragraphs preceding the Gingrich quote completely inconsistent with what Gingrich actually said?  There is no quote in the article (before or after) attributed to Gingrich where god is mentioned at all.  I’m sure some would argue that “personal sovereignty” itself stems from god, but god is not a sine qua non of personal sovereignty.  The logic of personally sovereign individuals loaning power to the state is unaffected by the nonexistence of a deity.

I’m not a huge fan of Gingrich, guns, or god.  And maybe this is what Gingrich actually believes, or has said before.  But unless I’m missing something, this is unacceptable journalism.

This is hardly sound analysis by Ms. Maddow. Both networks have their news and commentating arms. Commentators on both sides are, without a doubt, political whether or not the networks have such a policy in place. They cater to their respective right and left leaning bases and skew things intentionally to send political messages. The idea that somehow prohibiting campaign contributions by these people preserves some sort of neutrality blurs the fact that what they do night in and night out impacts American politics much, much more dramatically. Not to mention Olberman’s suspension is set to be lifted on Tuesday; I highly doubt a two day vacation will disincentivize Olberman from making campaign contributions in the future.

The cable news wars are funny. The commentators on both sides accuse eachother of lacking some aspect of journalistic ethics that each claim they themselves possess. How any of them can look into that camera every night and claim that they are any more a “journalist” than the other is absurd. And what’s worse is that viewers on both sides believe it and feel that what they see and hear every night is the truth while the other side is crazy. The real truth, of course, is that none of them are journalists and they know it. They are commentators whose business is NOT to be objective and thus transmit their politics to their millions of viewers.

So let’s just call a spade a spade. Both of these networks are political operations insofar as their commentating, primetime slots are concerned. They are eachothers’ ideological opposites but play the exact same role on their respective sides of the aisle. In all fairness, CNN is the closest thing to a news organization inasmuch as journalistic objectivity is concerned. The problem is that most Americans don’t want objectivity because they find it boring and/or they would rather reinforce their already held convictions (If you want to see just how boring pure objectivity can be tune into “The Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer). This is demonstrated by the fact that CNN can hang with neither MSNBC nor Fox News when it comes to ratings.

If only we would all just change the channel and put all these clowns out of business.

If only I would practice what I preach.

Yes, it’s certainly very hard to sympathize with Tiger in light of what he’s done.  His current predicament is a self-inflicted wound.  But why is this anybody’s business?  We often forget that celebrities and their families are real people that face many of the same hardships as everyone else.  I don’t think what Woods and his family are going through is any less painful just because of who they are.  The difference between someone like Tiger and someone like me is only relative.  I highly doubt that, in the midst of all of this, Tiger is thinking to himself, “Well, at least I’m still Tiger Woods.”

The lack of privacy here is stunning.  It can’t be justifiable just because Tiger is who he is and did what he did – I’m not sure that Tiger’s wife is any less humiliated by all of the coverage than Tiger himself.  Not to mention that he does have children who will be old enough one day to understand all of this.  And let me be clear: it makes little sense to blame the media entirely, although it’s inevitable that Tiger and others will.  The media only provides what’s in demand.  If people turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to these types of stories, then coverage of them would dwindle.  But considering the sheer magnitude of the coverage of this story, I suppose this appetite is human nature.