Hans Eisenbeis

Last night, we enjoyed Dan Cohen’s little chat at Raking Through Books about anonymous sources, and we found some closure. Cohen suggested that the real beacon of hope in press-source-public affairs has been and will continue to be the U.S. Supreme Court. A little background: Cohen sued the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press for … Read more

Sometimes things get so crazy around here on a day-to-day basis–y’ know, circulation scandals, declining stock prices, lapdog journalists going to jail for their petty, power-crazed sources–that we forget we’ve seen it all before. (Just for the record: Even lapdog journalists protecting God-complex sources shouldn’t have to forfeit their shoe laces–especially for articles they never … Read more

We take our holidays pretty seriously these days, and that means we don’t look at the newspaper if we can help it. But we’re grateful for certain industrious parties who obsess on the dirty work. So we heard from Rex that Garrison Keillor’s first newspaper column appeared this weekend, and we shuffled across the digital … Read more

Last week, we had the opportunity to tour the new Guthrie down our way, and we were impressed. The shell is more or less complete, and now the finishing work begins–a Herculean task that makes shoveling the stalls of Augeas look like a July picnic. Anyway, we were finally convinced of the genius of “the … Read more

There is nothing easier than complaining about TV news, except maybe complaining about the weather or commercial radio. Some like to blame the “broadcast journalists,” but we stopped calling them that years ago. Honestly, why continue to expect wisdom from the mouths of babes? Besides, it is not the newsreaders’ fault, and it is not … Read more

We’ve been holding our tongue on the whole Katherine Kersten Kolumnist thing, but after her tawdry little appearance here, we can no longer keep ourselves from mumbling out loud on several points. First, she definitely should have held pat with the original column photo. Every picture we’ve seen of this woman makes it clear to … Read more

Hard to believe, but reports say that Minneapolis’s new camera cops have snapped photos of nearly 2,000 runners of red lights. This fact reminds us that our favorite tune Paul Westerberg ever screamed is “Run It,” but it also reminds us that maybe we’re not quite the “nation of laws” we thought we were… or … Read more

In yesterday’s New York Times magazine, Matt Bai proposes that “South Park Conservatives” have nothing on “King of the Hill Democrats.” Bai maintains that Hank Hill is the living, breathing animation of the nation’s much-desired Nascar dad, and that Democrats like North Carolina governor Mike Easley are wise to poll their constituencies based on whether … Read more

One of the dumb things about the New Yorker’s website is that it is virtually impossible to find recently outdated articles. You can actually guess, by looking at the naming conventions, and discover that most of the content they have published on the site remains anchored in placid waters to a permanent URL. But the … Read more