Where

Exactly where a news story happened is often important. The Arkansas flash flood deaths occurred here. You can see how the hilly terrain could concentrate run-off into a flash flood.

Yet big media seldom pins down location. I don't understand why not. The tools are readily available on the Internet. During the Tennessee floods, I was able to locate the site of a photo in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, which told me how far the flood was out of its banks - a couple of hundred yards - which might be an important fact needed to understand the story.

There's also the back story of Albert Pike, a relatively minor Confederate general. Most non-Southerners would be amazed how many federal government sites in the South are named for Confederates.

Syncronicity: I happened to learn who Albert Pike was because the second National Treasure movie was on in my house, and it mentioned him. Yep, besides being a Confederate, he was a Freemason. Ooooweeooo.

Narrative correctness

Why is Rand Paul's Republican Teabagger victory in Kentucky CNN's top story on the political ticker? In the home state of Mitch McConnell and Jim Bunning, no amount of ideological extremism should be a surprise, and Paul's victory was so widely expected that it barely qualifies as news.

There was real news yesterday:

• Mark Critz (D-Murtha) unexpectedly beat Tim Burns (R-oops), which CNN gives one line.
  
• Joe Sestak (D-reality) ended the (elective) political career of Arlen Specter (DINO-opportunism).
• Richard Blumenthal (D-Apocalypse Now) ended his own political career.
• Bill Halter (D-semi-reality) forced Blanche Lincoln (D-subsidiary) into a runoff.
  

But CNN is wasting its pixels on teabaggers. It's not that CNN is filled with teabag sympathizers. But the "TRENDING" tag ought to be a clue.

Big media no longer wants to report what happened today. It wants to develop a story arc. That makes writing and editing easier - and laziness is the great inertial force in human behavior. But it also leads to all the really good gigs:

• Slots among the shouters on TV
• Big stories that the Pulitzer Committee might look twice at
• The change to cast a story into book form (or maybe that's just my dream)
  
• Hollywood (in their wildest TV movie fantasies)

Electorally, it was a pretty good day for Democrats. Why couldn't that have been the narrative? Pasting up a new narrative is hard work!

I suppose I should be happy that the media didn't go with its bullshit false equivalence reflex to claim that both Republican and Democratic extremists won. Maybe calling Sestak, Halter, and Critz extremists was too obviously nonsense even for the (non-Fox) media.

Nice guy neo-Confederate

Mike Huckabee:

I know what would happen if somebody comes to my state in Arkansas and tells us what to do, it doesn't matter what it is, tell us how to run our schools, tell us how to raise our kids, tell us what to do with our flag — you want to come tell us what to do with the flag, we'd tell them what to do with the pole.

These aren't even code words. These are out and out appeals to bigotry. Just in case we weren't listening, he said them twice in different locales.

By the way, we settled this one 140 years ago when we disposed of the treason symbolized by the Confederate battle flag, and we settled it again 40 years ago, when that so-called heritage symbol suddenly became important again in another attempt to resist and deny racial justice.

For those of you keeping score at home, this is why Republicans don't get black votes.