dev
Phoenix has landed
On Mars (click to enlarge). More here.
Post-Hagee post
I’m late to the party on this, but in the wake of the John Hagee “Hitler was a hunter” flap, McCain and his supporters are relying on the argument that Hagee, ahem, wasn’t McCain’s pastor for 20 years — i.e., Obama’s association with Reverend Wright is worse. Garbage: It’s exactly the reverse. Obama, who knew Rev. Wright not just as
Treachery, right and left
It’s a great day at Lerterland when both Joe Lieberman and Hugo Chávez get slammed on the editorial page of the NY Times. Lieberman would like government to decide what you can see on YouTube. (He’s also campaigning hard for John McCain, a matter for another post.) Chávez is looking guiltier on the matter of helping to arm and finance
Godard’s judgment
I’d never seen Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend” before last night, when I watched it twice, first without David Sterritt’s commentary, then with. It’s funny, the moral authority people still impute to Godard (and his role model Bertolt Brecht) on the subject of politics. The long passages of Maoist cant in “Weekend” are supposed to “get us thinking,” notes Sterritt, and yet
On Marcin Wasilewski
My review of pianist Marcin Wasilewski and his trio, in today’s Inquirer.
Hillarygaffes
Think Hillary’s RFK gaffe is bad? Why isn’t anyone talking about her far worse Zimbabwe gaffe? Via Yglesias yesterday: Hillary Clinton compared the plight of Zimbabweans in their recent fraudulent election to the uncounted votes of Michigan and Florida voters saying it is wrong when “people go through the motions of an election only to have them discarded and disregarded.” “We’re
McWhorter on conscious rap
“Why The Roots make cool art, but lousy politics,” goes the headline of John McWhorter’s three-page discourse on “conscious hip-hop.” McWhorter’s a conservative fellow — I mean that literally, he’s a fellow at the right-wing Manhattan Institute — with a deep appreciation of rap but a contrarian take on the employment market, the prison-industrial complex and so forth. Lots of
Where to begin?
“The people here, liberal people, will not vote for Obama because of his attitude towards Israel,” Ms. Weitz, 83, said, lingering over brunch. This appears early in Jodi Kantor’s piece on Florida Jews and the election. Since Obama’s “attitude towards Israel” is roughly 100 percent supportive, it’s hard to know what Ms. Weitz means. But it becomes clearer further down