Opinion

What do 42 state attorneys general, U.S. Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) and New Jersey's entire congressional delegation have in common?

Apparently, they all disagree with state Attorney General Anne Milgram on the Free Flow of Information Act, S. 2035, which would bring federal journalist "shield" law protections up to date with that of 49 other states plus the District of Columbia.

Barack Obama has shifted his energy strategy after the McCain campaign pounced on comments Obama made about properly inflating our tires.

"The essence of Democracy is an informed electorate," begins the mission statement of New Jersey's Election Law Enforcement Commission, but much of the information on ELEC's website has been off-limits to a significant portion of the electorate for years, and there are no plans to change that.

I'm not even talking about the clunky interface and seemingly random functionality. If you have that much access, consider yourself lucky.

Since at least 2005, ELEC has been aware that "Browsers such as Firefox and Netscape are not supported through our search engines."

In 2007, the only visible change to their help page was the inclusion of another unsupported platform: "At this time, the Macintosh platform and browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Netscape are not supported through our search engines."

Currently only the Internet Explorer browser is supported, and only on Windows (the old version of IE on Macs is not supported). The market share of IE, which has been declining since 2003, is now around 75 percent, which means that about one in four users would not be able to access the information they are searching for.

While trying to do some research, I called ELEC to explain that I am on a Macintosh computer and ask how I could access their information. According to the IT director, they don't have any plans to make the information available to those on the currently unsupported platforms.

Plagiarism is a bit like pornography - you know it when you see it, to paraphrase US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. 

But is the standard the same for bloggers? Given most blogs informal and causal tones, should bloggers be held to the same ethical standards of newspapers?

For some news organizations, "borrowing ideas" is OK, but not the "direct words".  For others, it is "one of journalism's unforgivable sins".
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Case in point, if I was writing this for a newspaper, I would have probably written:  For some news organizations like the Detroit Free Press, "borrowing ideas...is considered fair journalistic practice", but "words directly quoted from sources other than the writer's own reporting should be attributed."  For others like the Grand Forks Herald, it is "one of journalism's unforgivable sins", according to published excerpts on plagiarism by the Committee of Concerned Journalists.

After watching McCain's new ad mocking Barack Obama as a self-important celebrity along the likes of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, I was inspired by the last time Britney got involved with a politician in a commercial, back when the media was still in love with the straight-talk express.

With now less than 100 days to go until the presidential election, the veepstakes race is reportedly narrowing. The problem with the news reports is a gender bias that seems to keep cracking its head open on the glass ceiling.

To its credit, The New York Times public editor recently took a hard look at its own coverage -- "Pantsuits and the Presidency." In the column, Clark Hoyt quoted two experts that noted The Times did a better job than others in the media on the newsroom sexism measuring stick. 

What position currently held by Barack Obama will John McCain switch to next week?