Month: December 2006
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John Kerry’s case for flip-flopping
What do you do if you’re John Kerry and no one thinks you can win the 2008 presidential race? Apparently, you try to turn weakness into strength by reframing flip-flopping as open-mindedness — here’s what Kerry wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that ran under the snarky tagline “The case for flip-flopping” (via Power Line):
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Friedman whitewashes US Civil War
Thomas Friedman should stick to foreign affairs commentary — here’s his fairy tale history of the US Civil War from last week’s “Meet the Press”: We had a civil war in our country. We had a civil war because we thought some people in our country believed really bad things. Really bad things about human
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Escaping Iraq “the Chicago way”
Amidst all the depressing news from Iraq, the story of a government minister accused of corruption escaping from a Green Zone jail was particularly awful — no one even told us he was gone until the next day: Iraq’s former electricity minister, the most senior official arrested on corruption charges here, made a brazen escape
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Yglesias admits ignoring Berger story
Cheers to Matthew Yglesias for noting the Sandy Berger debacle. Unfortunately, he admits that he previously ignored the story for ideological reasons: With what I consider a great deal of justification, I tried to rigorously ignore the story of Sandy Berger poaching documents when it was first being pushed by conservatives who wanted to use
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Duke lacrosse rape charges dropped
The Duke lacrosse rape charges were dropped Friday while I was stuck in traffic on I-95, but district attorney Mike Nifong is still pursuing other charges, baffling everyone: A prosecutor’s decision to drop rape charges but keep other counts against three Duke University lacrosse players has left many legal experts – including some who had
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Crude NYT recounting of Summers remarks
A New York Times story yesterday offered an especially crude summary of former Harvard president Lawrence Summer’s controversial remarks on gender and aptitude: Organizers of these events dismiss the idea voiced in 2005 by Lawrence H. Summers, then president of Harvard, that women over all are handicapped as scientists because as a group they are
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Thomas Friedman’s latest cliche
Thomas Friedman’s cliche-spouting has entered the realm of geometry : Rule 2: Any reporter or U.S. Army officer wanting to serve in Iraq should have to take a test, consisting of one question: “Do you think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line?” If you answer yes, you can’t go to Iraq.
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Light holiday blogging
Due to family obligations, trips, and so forth, blogging is going to be intermittent here through mid-January. But keep an eye out; I’ll still be posting when I have time.
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Duke lacrosse case in free fall
DNA Security director Brian Meehan dealt yet another blow to the crumbling Duke lacrosse prosecution yesterday with this testimony about DNA test results from his lab that were not provided to the defense: [Defense attorney Jim] Cooney continued: Did Nifong and his investigators know the results of all the DNA tests? “I believe so,” Meehan
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Reporting without reading? NYT on Carter
Yesterday’s New York Times featured a story on controversy over Jimmy Carter’s new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid in which the reporter, Julie Bosman, quotes a misleading Michael Kinsley column without mentioning that it is apparently wrong: [T]he bulk of outrage has come from his use of the word apartheid in the title, apparently equating