It is time to take a bit of a summer stretch and enjoy the weather a bit. I'll be away for a bit—on a camping trip, where I won't have Internet access—but will post again on June 3.

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I couldn’t help but notice that President Obama chided the American media—the journalism end of it anyway—twice in Thursday’s speech on how a democracy deals with terrorists. As a guy—our first Crackberry president—who clearly understands both pop technology and pop culture, he could be forgiven if the intent of those references was interpreted as him saying, "Is it really too much to expect you guys to do your job?"

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By all appearances, our guy Jesse Ventura only has to clear his throat to be invited on damn near every talk show in the country. I mean, good lord, he's out there again flogging the paperback release of last year's book! But, like Ann Coulter (only better looking), Ventura is such guaranteed good copy, a font of such reliable, juice-injected sound bites that The View and Fox & Friends, and, even his nitwitness, Sean Hannity, would book him if they heard he was signing a credit card tab at the last Blarney Stone in Manhattan.

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There was a graduation in LambertLand this past weekend. Son #2, AKA Weasel #2, picked up his diploma after enduring a pablum-marinaded commencement speech apparently written for a group of fourth graders but mistakenly delivered to several hundred 22-year-old adults just finishing four years of training in critical thinking. But I digress. The inflow of relatives—can you say four runs to MSP International in one day?—plus all the fine (backyard) dining cut into my bloviating time. So much so that that bastard, what's his name Rich at The New York Times, anticipated my latest deep thought.

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There are times—fifteen to twenty of them a day—when I'm convinced the great fight of our time is not between radical Islam and the free and democratic West (or as I usually see it, their nut-bag religious zealots against our nut-bag religious zealots). Nor is it between socialism and capitalism or Pepsi and Coke. The real front lines are over where the combined forces of stupidity and laziness are aligned against consumers of science, empirical knowledge, and practicing skeptics.

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Reader John Sherman tipped me to veteran Washington Post reporter/editor/entrepreneur Walter Pincus's piece "Newspaper Narcissism," which is now up at the Columbia Journalism Review. For anyone who monitors the pulse rate of American newspapers, it is well worth the time it takes to read through to the end. (An irony here being that Pincus's piece is much too long—on a topic of marginal interest to "our readers," as modern editors are constantly saying with eery assuredness—to ever make any dead tree edition. If it had a Brett Favre hook, it'd be different.)

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If I were working for the Star Tribune, how would I rank the downer topics of the day on a grim to grimmer scale?

The Obama administration sees no likelihood of a federal bailout of newspapers? Mmmmm. Pretty low. Maybe if and when the government makes a profit off all that AIG dough but not now. No one is even wishful thinking on that one.

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My apologies or being offline for most of the past week. Roughly a month ago, our thirty-three-year-old niece, vacationing with her husband in Hawaii, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. She died shortly after Easter, and this past weekend was the memorial service for her in her hometown of Reno, Nevada. The service would have been held a week earlier, but being Reno, there was the problem of a Slots Championship soaking up every hotel room in town.

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