Monthly Archives: November 2007

Midnight Sun

I missed the anniversary of the birth of Johnny Mercer last week, but we’re still in the right month and it’s not too late to take note. Among the 1,000 songs for which Mercer is known to have written the lyrics are “One For My Baby (And One More For the Road),” “Accentuate the Positive,” “P.S. I Love You” (not the Beatles song), “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Any Place »

The Rudy-Romney dust-up; are they both right?

Things are getting quite nasty on the Republican side of the presidential race, especially between Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney. That these two would clash seems almost inevitable, given the stakes in New Hampshire where Romney leads but Giuliani is within striking distance. A Romney win in the Granite State, coupled with a win in Iowa, would give him a plausible claim to frontrunner status. A Giuliani win might represent »

Taliban Man: Obama doesn’t cut it with “core white Americans”

Politico reporter Ben Smith discovered that Yale’s infamous Taliban Man joined a university friends of Obama Facebook group, but that TM is not necessarily high on the candidate: Guessing from my experiences in America I don’t think he is going to be a strong leader who could bring important changes. Because, I think as a black man, with a muslim name that is similar to Osama, and a foreign born »

New poll shows Clinton trailing all five main Republican rivals

So reports the Washington Post. The poll is by Zogby Interactive, so take it for what it’s worth. Having polled nearly 10,000 individuals, Zogby asserts a margin of error of one percent. According to the poll, Barack Obama and John Edwards lead all Republican rivals, so these results tend to bolster their claim that Clinton is a bad bet for Dems when it comes to recapturing the White House. JOHN »

Why is Dick Cheney smiling?

Nina Easton asks in her exclusive Fortune interview: “Why is Dick Cheney smiling?” The interview barely touches on foreign policy and national security issues. I don’t get the sense that he was smiling when it did. »

We Won’t Have Trent Lott to Kick Around Any Longer

Trent Lott will announce today that he is retiring from the Senate at the end of next month. He is the sixth Senate Republican to announce that he will not seek re-election next year. Lott has been a reasonably conservative politician, but he is an old-style Republican who has never been comfortable with the transparency that today’s Republicans expect from their leaders. Lott tended to be more loyal to his »

Terrorists, Drug Cartel Threatened Arizona Base

Today’s Washington Times has a blockbuster report, based on leaked law enforcement documents, that a Mexican drug cartel collaborated with Iraqi and Afghan terrorists to plan an attack on Fort Huachuca in Arizona, the nation’s largest intelligence-training center: Fort officials changed security measures after sources warned that possibly 60 Afghan and Iraqi terrorists were to be smuggled into the U.S. through underground tunnels with high-powered weapons to attack the Arizona »

Corrections at the New York Times

Expanding on John Hinderaker’s “The Times does theology,” Roger Kimball comments on “Corrections at the New York Times.” Roger cleverly makes a point that John has made here occasionally in the past about Times corrections; the purported “correction” destroys the entire story. John made this point explicitly, for example, in “The Times does math…and this time it’s important.” Another good example of the phenomenon is John’s “New York Times hoaxed.” »

How bad was it?

I had the privilege of interviewing John Bolton on a conference call with Jay Nordlinger and a few other bloggy types (as Jay referred to us) while Bolton was serving as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations. I wrote about the interview in “My favorite ambassador” and in “My favorite ambassador, take 2.” Now that he is freed from the constraints of diplomatic service, Ambassador Bolton has produced »

Overcoming history

During the summer of 1971 Hillary Clinton interned at a well-known Oakland “Communist law firm.” Today’s New York Sun publishes two articles by Josh Gerstein exploring Ms. Hillary’s activities that summer. Mr. Bill and Ms. Hillary acknowledge that they lived together in Berkeley during the summer of 1971. The Sun calls it “The Clintons’ Berkeley summer of love.” Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham lived together in Berkeley while Ms. Clinton »

“I Believe!”

So says Dan Rather, in this Hollywood Reporter interview. I have generally found Rather an endearing character, to the extent I’ve paid attention. It’s hard not to sympathize with his desire to keep working as long as someone is willing to pay him, or with his claim to be an “independent” commentator on the news. There are two problems with Rather’s world-view. The first is that, while he may or »

Heroic rhetoric

When I first heard George W. Bush talking about “compassionate conservatism” in 1999, I figured (and certainly hoped) that it was at least 80 percent ad campaign and no more than 20 percent policy guide. Eight years later, it seems to me that, in practice, the Bush administration probably hasn’t strayed too far to the wrong side of that proportion. Nonetheless, it’s clear from reading his syndicated columns that Michael »

In Medias Miss World Res

Miss World is different from most beauty pageants in that it unfolds over a period of several weeks, with preliminary events in which winners are selected, leading up to the final night. This year the finale will be on December 1, from Sanya, China. Two preliminary winners have already been chosen, Beach Beauty and Miss Sports. Beach Beauty–historically a pretty good predictor of success in the final round–was won by »

In search of a change of heart

Carl in Jerusalem draws our attention to Laura Blumenfeld’s “only in Israel” story of the pediatriatric cardiologist who saves Arab children in Israel by day and hunts Arab terrorists as a combat helicopter pilot by night. Blumenfeld’s story is “A time to kill, and a time to heal.” Blumenfeld is the Washington Post reporter who is apparently now assigned to special projects for the Post. Her father is a rabbi »

MittSpace

I’ve written that the Republican side of the presidential race can be viewed as consisting of two semi-finals — one between Rudy Giuliani and John McCain and the other between Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and/or Mike Huckabee. However, polling data suggests that, at least in Iowa and New Hampshire, Romney may occupy his own space. In other words, it may be that Romney has his own core of solid support, »

The Times Does Theology

I always thought the New York Times’ pontifications on political and cultural subjects were a bit arrogant, but the paper has now extended its alleged omnicompetence to the realm of theology. From this morning’s Corrections section: A headline last Sunday about a Muslim man and an Orthodox Jewish woman who are partners in two Dunkin »

The eternal return of Hollywood politics, part 2

The New York Post’s Page Six reports on the latest bomb in Hollywood’s clueless antiwar jamoboree: While the public is staying away in droves from “Rendition,” “Lions for Lambs” and “In the Valley of Elah,” audiences are really avoiding “Redacted,” [director Brian] De Palma’s picture about US soldiers who rape a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, then kill her and her family. The message movie was produced by NBA Dallas Mavericks owner »