Sunday, Busy Sunday

I had a table at a local toy train show today. This was the first time I actually sold stuff at one of these shows. After a while, after several years of collecting, the time has come for me to adjust my toy train collection and sell off some of the items that I bought long ago in which I am no longer acutely interested. The benefits of this sort of thing to a collector are: 1. it makes room for new acquisitions; and 2. the money raised is welcome. So I was busy for a good part of the day today at the train meet. I had a good time and I did sell some stuff.

I also managed to listen to a couple of the Sunday morning political shows. The most interesting thing I heard on one of the shows, the Chris Matthews Show, was that ten of his regular guests were polled and they all thought that Obama would be the Democratic presidential nominee. Myself, I think it's too early to write off Hillary. Anyway, it has been fun to observe the fallout from the Iowa caucuses. Obama really shook things up on the Democratic side. Huckabee's win also disrupted the best laid plans of Mitt the flip-flopper, which made my heart glad. This week comes New Hampshire. It will be fun to watch even though I don't like any of the leading candidates on either side of the aisle.

Jim

The Slanted Network Reporting

Media Matters, the media watchdog group, reminds us that we're being served a constant slanted version of the news by the network political pundits including Tim Russert and Chris Matthews. These people are not objective journalists. They have their own personal agendas, which they allow to color their on air reporting in a most unprofessional way. The latest example comes as these "professionals" gush over John McCain even though he finished fourth in Iowa:

In case you're wondering, no candidate, Democrat or Republican, has ever won his or her party's nomination after
finishing fourth in a contested Iowa caucus, or after winning as little as 13
percent of the vote. Yet this is "very good news for John McCain," according to
some of the nation's most powerful journalists, ignoring the fact that the only
way in which this is good news for McCain is that they keep saying it is good
news for McCain.

If the network news stars say it is so it must be so, right?

PHOTO: Philadelphia's Suburban Station, a deco masterpiece.

Jim