politics

The Gipper

Last night, during the RNC, there was a video tribute to Ronald Reagan. Not once, but twice the voiceover intoned, “President Ronald Reagan never forgot who he was.”

English

Nice.

How do you bowl a 37?

I took Isa bowling when we were in Lake Tahoe. I strongly suggested that she not use the bumpers. She was amenable to the idea–she was five hundred miles from home, there were no peers around and the stakes were low. She bowled a 44, and we celebrated wildly. But I expect more from someone […]

He’s like a therapist to me sometimes as well

There’s a lot to hate about Meghan McCain’s take on her father’s recent barbecue, even if you can get past the overly cozy relationship between candidate and press. There’s the insistence on referring to the house as a “cabin.” There’s the melanoma ravaged presumptive Republican nominee openly daring the sun. But mostly there’s the telling […]

The political winds

There was a New York State Senate election yesterday in a mostly-rural district along the eastern edge of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River, an area where 300 inches of snowfall in a year is not unusual. Republicans hold an 8-5 registration advantage here and have held this seat for nearly 100 years. Polls […]

If you want it done right…

Think Progress has a nice catch from an NPR interview, in which Attorney General Mukasey acts as if the current debate about waterboarding is academic: OK, let’s assume that the president wants, despite a finding of illegality under law, to have waterboarding done, who is it precisely that he’s going to get to do it? […]

tastes and preferences

Emptywheel is my favorite political blogger. Her name is Marcy Wheeler, she used to be a comp lit professor, and she specializes in close reading of text from trials, Congressional hearings, and redacted documents. I started reading her a few years ago, around the time Judy Miller emerged from jail, bony, girlish and incongruously triumphant. […]

Voting in Topanga Canyon

My old pot dealer’s wife checked me in. I said, “I’m John Levenstein, American.” She started laughing, then couldn’t stop laughing, and things bogged down for a while. The other woman running the polling place put a provisional ballot in the official ballot box by mistake, and then swore us all to secrecy.

State of the Union

The President is drunk and Dingell is dozing. Anyone else watching?

Perino wins what?

Undeniably sexy White House spokesperson Dana Perino won an odd little battle with the New York Times over a sub-heading to a story about the decision to destroy the CIA torture tapes. She got the paper to retract the claim that the “White House Role Was Wider Than It Said.” The body of the piece […]

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