Month: February 2007
-
TNR’s boring headline contest
In honor of the magazine’s sale to CanWest, a Canadian company, the editors of The New Republic have provided PDFs of the magazine’s best Canada-related articles, including a famous 1986 contest to see if anyone could come up with a more boring headline than “Worthwhile Canadian initiative” (which actually did run on the New York
-
Bookshare.org on CBS Evening News
From 2001-2004, I worked for Benetech, an award-winning social entrepreneurial technology non-profit. Over the last year, exciting things have been happening. My boss Jim Fruchterman, who founded Benetech, won a MacArthur “genius” award back in September. And last week its project Bookshare.org, an online service that makes books accessible to people with visual and reading
-
Romney doc: “Hillary=France”
Via Drudge, the Boston Globe has obtained a Romney campaign presentation containing some clichéd anti-Hillary demagoguery — “Hillary=France”! The plan, for instance, indicates that Romney will define himself in part by focusing on and highlighting enemies and adversaries, such common political targets as “jihadism,” the “Washington establishment,” and taxes, but also Democratic presidential candidate Hillary
-
Hillary’s two theories of power politics
Has anyone noticed the contrast between Hillary Clinton’s position on responding to attacks from political opponents and her position on responding to insurgent attacks in Iraq? On the one hand, the experiences of Michael Dukakis and John Kerry have convinced Clinton and other like-minded Democrats that the best response to domestic political attacks is to
-
Marshall: Cheney advanced al Qaeda agenda
It was bound to happen. For years since 9/11, Republicans have suggested that anti-war dissent helps al Qaeda. Now Josh Marshall, an influential center-left blogger, has reversed the charges, arguing that “It’s hard to imagine that there’s anyone in this country not under active federal surveillance who has done more to advance the al Qaeda
-
Gaffney redoubles attack on dissent
Undeterred by the exposure of his use of a phony Abraham Lincoln quote, Washington Times columnist Frank Gaffney has redoubled his attack on dissent, as Greg Sargent pointed out. In a column last Tuesday, Gaffney dredges up a new Lincoln quote attacking “agitators” during the Civil War who were arrested for fomenting rebellion and uses
-
Paltrow: “Almost everyone” has a cell
This year’s Hollywood is out of touch moment from the Oscars — Gwyneth Paltrow’s (pre-written) award introduction began with “Thanks to cell phones, almost everyone in the world is now a cinematographer.” Um, “almost everyone”? There are approximately 2.2 billion cell phone subscribers worldwide, but how many of their phones can take video? More importantly,
-
Mitt Romney’s baby carriage ditty
Mitt Romney is apparently trying to lock down the social conservative vote among nine-year-olds: Republican Mitt Romney recited a schoolyard ditty Thursday to underscore his argument that traditional marriage is essential for improving education. “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage,” the presidential hopeful told a crowd of
-
Rush Limbaugh says Pelosi has “gone hormonal”
In another anti-woman smear from the originator of “feminazi,” Rush Limbaugh explains Nancy Pelosi’s criticism of Vice President Cheney by saying “You know, girl’s gone hormonal”: RUSH: My hero, Dick Cheney, is back. The highest levels of the administration are not backing down. He was on Good Morning America today from Sydney, Australia. Correspondent Jonathan
-
Rick Reilly smeared in SI letter
Earlier this month, I noted a Rick Reilly column in Sports Illustrated that gently turned against the war in these concluding paragraphs: Athletes love teams, and when they run out of sports teams they sometimes join bigger teams, ones with Humvees for huddles and tombstones for trophies and coaches they’ve never met sending them into