We have to humbly respect the inherent ambiguity of political issues, including issues of war. And this is why, as a matter of principle, I cannot christen my own opinion about whether U.S. troops should get out of Iraq as soon as possible as "the Christian position." You can believe there are "smart" and "dumb" positions on this and every other political question (yours is of course the "smart" one). But there is no distinctly "Christian" position on this.

Noriega early last month went to Chicago to rub elbows with liberal bloggers at the Yearly Kos convention, and received the endorsement of Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas. But then Noriega returned home and told the Texas Broadcasters Association that the blogs are as destructive a force in democracy as talk radio. "We've seen talk radio become an organizing tool for the die-hard right, while liberals are credited with turning the blogosphere into a political weapon. Each of those media has a targeted demographic group and works them into an ideological lather," Noriega said. "This, I believe, is damaging to the political culture in this country." Noriega spokesman James Aldrete said Noriega was not criticizing all politically active blogs, just those that engage in the "politics of division." Aldrete said Noriega believes talk radio and some bloggers would rather keep the country divided than find solutions to problems.

... an Austin woman who identifies herself as Boadicea Warrior Queen managed the Web site. Boadicea agreed to be interviewed if her real name was not used.

Three Keys to Victory: Texas Tech 1. Rattle the 'Diesel' No, not Shaq - UTEP freshman QB Trevor Vittatoe, aka "Diesel.'' Vittatoe had a rocky first start, completing only 6 of 21 passes for 59 yards. But he's the same guy who led Class 5A Hurst Bell to a 14-1 season and a state championship in high school, when he was a 60-percent passer.

Diane, that's tactics. We don't know what the President knows in terms of intelligence as to uh, how they can pinpoint where Osama bin Laden is right now. I think the point is clearly he's there. Clearly he's somewhere along the Afghan/Pakistan uh, border. And clearly, he's still giving orders. Uh ... and the even broader concern that Americans should have is that Al Qaeda is still - uh - out there in the world there in Western Europe, they're in the United States, they're in Iraq. Uh ... Iraq is part of the global effort - the global war - that AQ and radical fundamental Muslim have been carrying on against us for some time. We didn't pay attention to it for a while. But we are now. And we're finding that there's a global war going on against us. And we'd better figure out a way to contain it because it's going to be with us for a long time ...

A phone caller the other day said he believes The News is anti-Christian, anti-fundamentalist, pro-multiculturalism and generally too quick to call everything into question. He pointed out that many of our readers are conservative white folks, and suggested that we should try to tailor the news to their liking. He also opined that our thinking as journalists was warped by the '60s. There's much to say about this. For instance, journalists are probably children of the '60s – but that would be the 1760s, not the 1960s. We do have professional biases, but not necessarily the political ones that many people suspect. And we try hard not to tailor the news to the prejudices of our audience, but to their interests. Professional history Journalists in the U.S. aren't licensed, but we are a profession in the sense of having a shared sense of our history. That history dates back to the age of the American Enlightenment, which spanned the end of the colonial era and the rise of a free nation. Several intellectual and cultural features characterized the time: • A craving for knowledge and wisdom. • A belief that an informed public should govern itself, and that public debate, with all the available facts on the table, was the route to civic wisdom. • A sense that following Reason (they loved their capital letters back then) was akin to following God, because why else would the Creator give us the power of reason? From the late 1600s until the Revolutionary War, freedom of inquiry and freedom of the press were huge influences in Colonial politics. Colonial journalists, in turn, were deeply influenced by the political and philosophical debates of the time. John Peter Zenger's 1735 acquittal on charges of libeling the governor of New York was a political sensation, because the jurors effectively ruled that the press could criticize those in power, so long as it did so truthfully. After the war, Thomas Jefferson famously said, "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." The First Amendment was designed to ensure that the young nation would have both. Bias or mission? Our origins have left a stamp on the modern-day profession. A certain mindset is common across most of the nation's newsrooms. Journalists generally think they should: • Help voters hold government accountable to the public, by treating all public proclamations skeptically. • Treat no fact or claim as beyond question. • Give a voice to all sides of every public debate. • Extend special care for the needs or stories of the otherwise voiceless – the ordinary people who lack money or organization to influence government through lobbyists, for instance. • Follow stories, once launched, to their natural conclusions. As journalists, we view these things not as form of political bias but as a professional mission. One can understand, however, why some of our readers would feel otherwise. If one is a devoted follower of the political party in power, one is likely to view journalists' more probing questions as a form of impertinence, or perhaps of attack. (Mr. Jefferson, who so revered newspapers before his presidency, said this afterward: "Advertisements … contain the only truths to be relied upon in a newspaper." Based partly on a long history of governmental manipulation of the facts, we tend to think that failure to ask hard questions amounts to dereliction of duty. But we do try to ask hard questions of any and all parties in power. If one devoutly believes in a fundamentalist reading of any religious text, one might regard stories that reflect well on other beliefs as an assault one's own faith; we tend to focus on the duty to tell all sides of every story. One might also see repeated reports on misdeeds by clerics of one's own faith as an assault on fellow believers. We tend to think we are just following stories to their natural end – say, from arrest to indictment to trial to conviction – and that we are protecting the vulnerable from abuse. Appealing to interests Finally, it's probably true that most traditional journalists strongly resist tailoring the news to the prejudices of their audiences. There are celebrities and showmen who specialize in forging comfortable emotional bonds with true believers in their audience. Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken can be heard on the radio, Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan can be watched on cable TV, and Michael Moore can be viewed in the movie theater. But traditional newspaper journalists generally try to appeal to their readers' interests. In the features sections, that means what it sounds like. We try to write about things that interest our readers. In the "hard news" sections, it means we try to look out for our readers' best interests by sharing as much useful information and perspective – good and bad, agreeable and disagreeable – as time and space permit. This all sounds very noble, and I think it's a fair description of what we aspire to be. But, alas, it's not a fair description of every story in the paper. We're all quite human. We sometimes fail to ask questions, or we ask the wrong ones, or we make false assumptions that skew our stories. Finally, there's an element of judgment in everything we do that makes journalism far more an art (we often call it a "craft") than a science. All sorts of folks in the newsroom make those judgments, from all sorts of perspective. We have some fairly liberal writers and editors – not New York liberal, maybe, but liberal for Texas – we have moderates, and we also have some whose politics lie to the right of Ethelred the Unready. We've got some great journalists who never graduated from college and at least one with a Ph.D. in molecular biology. So, as one might imagine, we ourselves wake up on many mornings asking each other, "Did we get that right?"

I know nothing more about this case than I've read in the media, but the MSM accounts follow a pattern that I've observed in dozens of controversial death in custody cases over the years: In cases where the department might be held liable, initial reports are often flat out lies. Literally falsehoods. Fabrications. When there is no evidence public yet, police spinmeisters can and do say whatever they think makes the department look best. Often these lies aren't even necessary - they sometimes appear to be just habitual. The media then dutifully report these misstatements to the public. Within a week or so, a tiny bit of truth trickles out and police must backtrack. The media print a less prominent story with the added information. Finally, weeks later, if evidence arises of police culpability that contradicts earlier statements, the story gets covered again, but by this time the record is strewn with false and misleading statements and often the public's attention has shifted to another topic. At this point, one of two things happen: Either the story goes away, or in order to gin up public interest again, the media must publish a "gotcha" story that accuses the department of lying (since they did) and that causes the department to circle the wagons further to protect the officers in all but the most clear-cut cases. This pattern of media coverage doesn't just happen in Houston, btw. It's how police PIOs handle "critical incidents" just about everywhere.