Category: Uncategorized

Rudy finishes sixth in Michigan, behind Ron Paul and Fred Thompson, and barely ahead of Uncommitted.

Of course, he’s faced challenges before, like on the morning of nine-eleven nine-eleven nine-eleven …

— The candidates obviously negotiated some sort of detente in the wake of this week’s race and gender controversies. They took some swipes at each other, but the overall tone was quite positive, and it reflected well on them.

— Tim Russert’s entire shtick consists of “gotcha!” He seemed to spend the entire evening trying to trip the candidates up in one minor inconsistency or another. “In old photographs, you appear to be younger — but now you are clearly older! Explain THAT!”

— The entire first segment of the debate was utterly issue-free, entirely about horse-race issues, Hillary crying, Obama being black, that sort of thing. Russert and Williams should really be ashamed of their priorities; it was as if they set out determined to prove the worst blogosphere stereotypes about them true.

— It’s well and good to blame the current economic meltdown on the Bush administration’s deliberate lack of regulatory oversight, but we shouldn’t forget that it was Hillary Clinton’s husband who pushed the repeal of Glass Steagall, which made the current mess possible.

— Obama says that if we could solve the problem of nuclear waste storage, then we should build more nuclear plants. Great, and if we can teach pigs to fly, we should all lie back on a pleasant patch of grass and enjoy their delightful aerial antics.

— At what point will the networks understand that email is no longer an exciting new technology, but rather just another mundane fact of life? It’s not as bad as the You Tube snowman, but it seems somewhat silly to have someone standing in front of a laptop reading off an occasional “email question,” as if three or four of these over the course of the evening somehow constitute a groundbreaking application of exciting new interactive technologies.

— For all the nitpicking one can (and will) do, it’s nice to see relatively rational people vying for leadership, in contrast to the travelling freak shows that are the Republican debates. Not to mention being able to string a succession of words together into coherent sentences, unlike the current occupant of the Oval Office (who even the R’s are doing their best to erase from collective memory, hence their frequent invocations of a President who left office twenty years ago.)

… also, meant to mention: totally lame to exclude Kucinich. At this point, anyone still in the running should be part of the discussion. I don’t need Tim Russert deciding whose voice I should and should not be listening to.

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba — The chief of the U.S. military said Sunday he favors closing the prison here as soon as possible because he believes negative publicity worldwide about treatment of terrorist suspects has been “pretty damaging” to the image of the United States.

“I’d like to see it shut down,” Adm. Mike Mullen said in an interview with three reporters who toured the detention center with him on his first visit since becoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff last October.

His visit came two days after the sixth anniversary of the prison’s opening in January 2002. He stressed that a closure decision was not his to make and that he understands there are numerous complex legal questions the administration believes would have to be settled first, such as where to move prisoners.

The rest.

Some BBC show on the radio earlier had a rundown of the songs various candidates are playing at their rallies. Hillary Clinton has switched from Celine Deon to Tom Petty’s “An American Girl,” while Barack Obama is playing “Signed, Sealed, Delivered.” And then there’s John Edwards, who’s evidently been playing Bruce Springsteen’s “The River,” quite possibly one of the saddest songs ever written. I understand that thematically it’s in keeping with the message of his campaign, but still:

I got a job working construction
For the Johnstown Company
But lately there ain’t been much work
On account of the economy
Now all them things that seemed so important
Well mister they vanished right into the air
Now I just act like I don’t remember
and Mary acts like she don’t care

But I remember us riding in my brother’s car
Her body tan and wet down at the reservoir
At night on them banks I’d lie awake
And pull her close just to feel each breath she’d take
Now those memories come back to haunt me
They haunt me like a curse
Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true
Or is it something worse, that sends me

Down to the river
Though I know the river is dry
That sends me down to the river tonight

Man, I’ll bet they’re just dancing in the aisles at the Edwards rally after that one plays. At least he didn’t choose “Atlantic City.”

The Times’ Public Editor tackles the Kristol Kontroversy:

The choice of Safire, who retired in 2005, set off a storm of protest. “The Times could have saved themselves about 50 grand a year if they just sent an office boy over to the White House to pick up the press releases,” fumed Nicholas von Hoffman of The Washington Post. Kristol’s appointment has not fared any better. “Pretty much the worst idea ever,” grumped Gawker, the New York media gossip Web site.

Of the nearly 700 messages I have received since Kristol’s selection was announced — more than half of them before he ever wrote a word for The Times — exactly one praised the choice.

Rosenthal’s mail has been particularly rough. “That rotten, traiterous [sic] piece of filth should be hung by the ankles from a lamp post and beaten by the mob rather than gaining a pulpit at ANY self-respecting news organization,” said one message. “You should be ashamed. Apparently you are only out for money and therefore an equally traiterous [sic] whore deserving the same treatment.”

Kristol would not have been my choice to join David Brooks as a second conservative voice in the mix of Times columnists, but the reaction is beyond reason. Hiring Kristol the worst idea ever? I can think of many worse. Hanging someone from a lamppost to be beaten by a mob because of his ideas? And that is from a liberal, defined by Webster as “one who is open-minded.” What have we come to?

What, indeed? Mercy me, such vile language (and bad spelling!) in the one email out of seven hundred he has chosen to reprint! Somebody fetch the smelling salts!

And then there’s this:

Rosenthal said: “Some people have said we shouldn’t have hired him because he supports the war in Iraq. That’s absurd.”

Er, no. That’s maybe what Rosenthal is hearing — what people are actually saying is that he shouldn’t have been hired because he has been wrong on everything over the course of this war, not to mention the fact that he is an operator first and a commentator second, and his commentary is frequently and deliberately dishonest and misleading in the service of his objectives. If it became necessary to start drafting six year olds to maintain the occupation of Iraq, Bill Kristol would be first in line arguing that six year olds are really much more mature than anyone realizes, and that the experience would be a completely beneficial one for them.

Toward the end, at least, Hoyt does at least acknowledge that this is an odd reward for someone who has absolutely no respect for the First Amendment:

On Fox News Sunday on June 25, 2006, Kristol said, “I think the attorney general has an absolute obligation to consider prosecution” of The New York Times for publishing an article that revealed a classified government program to sift the international banking transactions of thousands of Americans in a search for terrorists.

Publication of the article was controversial — my predecessor as public editor first supported it and then changed his mind — but Kristol’s leap to prosecution smacked of intimidation and disregard for both the First Amendment and the role of a free press in monitoring a government that has a long history of throwing the cloak of national security and classification over its activities. This is not a person I would have rewarded with a regular spot in front of arguably the most elite audience in the nation.

To put it mildly.