Politics and “tar baby”
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Every morning, I look at the traffic stats for the MPR regional news & information site. I like to see what people are responding to. OK, fine, you caught me. I look to see how Polinaut is doing (4th most popular page on the site, and moving rapidly up on Midday and Midmorning, which is the real reason why Kerri Miller is doing that Fox TV gig).
Anyway, without reading the papers this morning, I did today's routine exercise and notice this story was the most visited page on the site yesterday.
When a two-month-old story comes in #1, I know something's going on and some high fallutin' Web site has either linked to it, or a bunch of people had a reason to Google it.
So I did, and, sure enough... Tony Snow came through in his first media briefing as White House press secretary with this little quip:
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Again, I would take you back to the USA Today story, simply to give you a little context. Look at the poll that appeared the following day. While there was -- part of it said 51 percent of the American people opposed, if you look at when people said, if there is a roster of phone numbers, do you feel comfortable that -- I'm paraphrasing and I apologize -- but something like 64 percent of the polling was not troubled by it. Having said that, I don't want to hug the tar baby of trying to comment on the program -- the alleged program -- the existence of which I can neither confirm nor deny.
Hmm...that briefing was at 12:30 ET yesterday and I've been doing this long enough to know that if a story shoots to #1 on our site in connection with something that happened halfway through the day, then something other than the orderly progression of the news cycle is taking place.
Someone, my theory goes, is trying to whip up the troops.
First we find something called Whizbang which mentions the incident
John Amato even links to three stories (1, 2, 3) that, he says, show people have been fired for using the term. I read those three stories, and no one gets fired...
One of the links -- #1 actually -- is the story referenced above. Now the next assignment. Find out who the heck John Amato is. Whizbang, whatever that is, references something called Think Progress, whatever that is.
But in
