Since moving to DC, I've picked up Michael and Emily's weekly ritual of reading the Sunday New York Times every week. The problem is that I tend to naturally seek the most enraging and righteous-adrenaline-inducing articles I can find.
For instance! This weekend's NYTimes Magazine has a horrorshow frontpage article on The War On Contraception. The seriously deranged quotes from Christian Evangelicals ("I cannot imagine any development in human history, after The Fall, that has had a greater impact on human beings than the (contraception) pill,") are merely surprising. What's enraging is the massive amount of federal funding ($205 million in 2007, up from $80mil in 2001) for the farce known as "Abstinence Education", aka plying teens with blatantly false misinformation. (E.g., "Condoms fail to prevent HIV approximately 31 percent of the time.")
Meanwhile on page A1, The CIA is being recleansed into an institution focused on "the primary task of supporting the agency's spying operations, rather than producing broad intelligence assessments for policymakers." In other words, it doesnt matter that we don't actually have any real intelligence on Iran-- The new CIA will still have the impressive ability to find WMDs there when asked. (Or at least, to not not find WMDs there.)
So when I read the NYT (or any news outlet), these are the kinds of articles I focus on. I'm not sure whether it's really a healthy or productive way to spend my time. At least I finally unsubscribed from Atrios and Americablog RSS feeds last month, so my net useless-political-rage-per-week is hopefully less now than it used to be.
