It's hard work throwing people out of their jobs, forcing hardships onto their families, watching as hopes and careers fade.

It's a tough job, but somebody has to do it, somebody has to keep those quarterly reports looking good.

And when the dirty job is over and all those inconvenient employee have left the premises, it's not just Miller Time -- it's time to be generously rewarded

Heck, more than generous, as execs at Gannett -- the huge chain of newspapers -- have demonstrated:.

Quick --  can you think of any "media events" from the last 10 or 15 years bigger than the expected return of Tiger Woods to the PGA Tour?

Oh, come on! Surely you can think of something. I know Tiger's return from scandal and disgrace occupies the minds of every living American 24/7, but surely something must have been bigger.

Didn't we invade another country under the false pretense that its crazy dictator was about to nuke us?

And wasn't there an attack by terrorists in New York on one of those big skyscrapers that killed a lot of people? I can't remember because my mind is so occupied by the imminent return of Tiger.

More specifically, at Texas A&M Commerce.

The head football coach of the school not only admitted that two of his players committed a theft, he said he was proud of them for doing it.

You see, the student newspaper had printed a story about one of the players being arrested in a drug bust.

Rep. Vern Ehlers, R-Michigan, is expected to announceon Wednesday that he will not seek re-election in the 3rd District.

Naturally, the media will cite this as an example of how the Republican Party is falling apart at the seams as its members flee in the face of tough elections fights ----- NOT!!

Ehlers -- in a district that went 49-49 in the presidential election -- is bowing out in the face of a primary challenge.

And that leaves this district as a potential Democratic pickup.

Wingnuts have been deluging NPR with nasty emails about the animated cartoon by Mark Fiore called "Learn to Speak Tea Bag."

NPR's Ombudsman, Alicia Shepard, addressed the issue in a column today that quotes extensively from angry wingnut emails and denounces the cartoon as a "mean-spirited attack."

That said, there are problems with the Tea Bag animation. Chief among them is it doesn't fit with NPR values, one of which is a belief in civility and civil discourse.

Fiore is talented, but this cartoon is just a mean-spirited attack on people who think differently than he does and doesn't broaden the debate. It engages in the same kind of name-calling the cartoon supposedly mocks.

The Transportation Security Administration through the Department of Homeland Security has issued subpoenas to two travel bloggers who posted the contents of  TSA’s Security Directive SD-1544-09-06, which was issued in the wake of the Christmas Day terrorist attempt to blow up an aircraft.

This was the attempt, you will recall, by the wannabe terrorist who was only able to set himself on fire. The TSA responded with a new security directive imposing new procedures for screening passengers and restricting their movements in-flight.

That directive was apparently received by at least two bloggers who write about travel issues and wrote about the directive. The TSA apparently wants to know who sent the directive and has issued subpoenas to find out.

A post by a Chicago Sun-Times web editor starts with these comments left by readers:

"Lock this monkey up in a cage next to Bubba. Go get the other monkeys in his gang and lock them up as well."

"Blacks are far too lazy and co-dependent on whites to ever change -- if they did who'd pay for their babies and food?"

"If it happened on Mars, I'd say he was a Martian. But it happened in Logan Square, so I said he was an illegal. Wanna bet?"

The Santa Barbara Daily Sound has issued an apology for a column it printed by a guest columnist that suggested perhaps a bounty should be placed on the head of President Obama.

There’s no excuse for why the article was published. The column is indefensible and the proper measures have been taken to ensure such hatred is never published again.

We would like to apologize for breaking the trust of our readers. Even if the assassination of our president wasn’t Perry’s intended meaning — which she claims — it’s a conclusion that many highly educated people came to.

No excuse, indeed.

One of the bedrock principles of newspaper journalism for as long as I can remember has been that advertising does not dictate the news -- advertisers do not get to buy favorable treatment, the sales staff does not get to veto stories that might piss off an advertiser.

There was always a wall of separation between editorial and advertising.

That wall came crashing down in Dallas today.

It's bad enough that Obama hasn't put everybody back to work yet, that he hasn't paid off the Bush deficit, that he hasn't parachuted into Waziristan and personally punched Osama bin Laden in the face and that he hasn't begun summary executions of Wall Street's thieves.

But last night at the state dinner for the prime minister of India, Obama heaped mounds of disgrace on America with the bad, horrible, terrible spelling on the dinner menu.

Oh, woe is us!!!!!!!

Read it here in the New York Times, if you dare.

CNN, which invented cable news, has hit a new low -- last place in the ratings among cable news shows during prime time with the 25-to-54 age group that advertisers love.

The network is not only running behind Fox and MSNBC, it is also trailing its own HLN, which used to be Headline News.

The only primetime show that isn't dead last is Larry King Live, and that show is just clinging to third place.

Some rather Draconian cuts are going into effect on Thursday at KTTV in Los Angeles, a Fox station.

A senior editor at the station, Mark Sudock, has written an open letter to Rupert Murdoch begging him to intervene to stop the cuts from gutting the news operation.

The letter points out all the many stories that the station covers -- from wildfires, earthquakes, etc. -- and the usefulness it has to the community. And he points out the loss to the community because the cuts "are so severe that virtually no one remains on-site to technically maintain the facility."

And then he makes a suggestion, one which shows he doesn't really understand the man the letter is adressed to:

A few days ago Stars and Stripes reported on a Pentagon program in which reporters who want to embed with American military units in Afghanistan are required to undergo background checks.

U.S. public affairs officials in Afghanistan acknowledged to Stars and Stripes that any reporter seeking to embed with U.S. forces is subject to a background profile by The Rendon Group, which gained notoriety in the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq for its work helping to create the Iraqi National Congress. That opposition group, reportedly funded by the CIA, furnished much of the false information about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction used by the Bush administration to justify the invasion.

These background checks were reported to have the purpose of determining whether the reporters' previous writings about the war had been "positive" or "negative."

The summer of 1969 will always be remembered for three momentous events that occurred within a span of just a few weeks -- the moon landing, Woodstock and Hurricane Camille.

Camille was one of just three hurricanes known to have struck the United States that remained Category 5 at landfall. The other two were the Labor Day storm of 1935 that hit the Florida Keys and Andrew in 1992, which crossed Florida south of Miami then went on to ravage southwestern Louisiana.

Camille struck 40 years ago today -- just before midnight on Sunday, Aug. 17 and into the early morning hours of Monday, Aug. 18. The last measurement of the storm before landfall put maximum sustained winds at 180-190 mph with gusts up to 220 mph. The barometric pressure was 909 mbar, the lowest recording at landfall since the 1935 storm. The storm surge at Pass Christian was 22.6 feet.

Gun freak and generally washed-up rock star Ted Nugent says he has been fired from his gig as a columnist for the Waco Tribune-Herald.

Was it because he wrote some sort of wild piece advocating free machine guns for mental patients?

No. He says it was because his editor told him he had to be nice and wasn't allowed to say anything mean.

Teabaggers haven't seceded from the Union (yet) and haven't fired on Fort Sumter (yet) but at least one group of them has already rejected an important measure of American sovereignty -- control over the issuance of currency and coinage, which the Constitution grants to Congress.

Article I grants Congress the power "To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures; To provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States;"

But what would teabaggers be without Tea Party Dollars? Yes, these private dollars are being minted by an anti-Federal Reserve group called NORFED and offered for sale. You can see a picture of one at the link.

These are apparently the same people who just last month were ordered by a federal magistrate to cease distribution of a similar silver "Liberty Dollar."

Media Matters is taking the fight directly to crazed birther Lou Dobbs on CNN.

Ads challenging Dobbs' sanity on this obsession of his will run for a week starting on Tuesday.

And here's the best part -- they are due to run on Lou Dobbs' show. Unless, of course, CNN decides to continue its disgraceful tolerance of Dobbs' lunacy by refusing to accept the ads.

It has been more than 30 years since the end of the Vietnam War.

But the war didn't really end when the helicopters lifted off from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon. In fact, for hundreds of people, the war went on and on, month after month, year after year.

In fact, it is still going on as leftover land mines continue to claim lives all these years later.

Consider this recent report in a Cambodian newspaper: