SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A former journalist who became the subject of a Hollywood movie after he was caught fabricating articles in the late 1990s is fighting to become a lawyer in California over the objections of a state bar committee. (more)
If you are looking for something deep and psychological to read today, look no further: New York Mag has profiled Marty Peretz, editor of the New Republic and eater of his own foot. This scene in particular struck a chord with me: (more)
Last week, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell joined the First Church of No Earmarks (for the moment anyway), but now he faces another tough test: will he appoint spending-cutters to the Appropriations Committee? (more)
Just last week, the Transportation Security Administration had an 80 percent approval rating. Then, after a few days of media scrutiny, its numbers began to crash. As The Daily Caller noted yesterday, the number of Americans who approve of the TSA dropped 16 points in a single week, and is still plummeting. (more)
1.) Potential Obama nominee Elizabeth Warren is a huge pain in the ass, former colleagues say — “While the general consensus seems to be that Warren will get the chance to head the consumer-centered agency she claims to have come up with, it has not gone unnoticed that the Obama administration appears to be dragging its feet on her nomination.” TheDC’s Amanda Carey can tell you why: Warren is an obnoxious human being. “[She] has gotten major criticism in the way she’s carried out her duties,” George Mason law professor Todd Zywicki told TheDC. “There are serious concerns about her impartiality and that she uses these jobs as a platform for self promotion.” A bankruptcy attorney who worked with Warren on the National Bankruptcy Review Commission added his own anecdotes to claims that Warren is only in this for the chance at a daytime talk show. For example: When it came time for the committee to draft its report, Warren hijacked the process, substantially rewrote several sections, and told everyone else involved in the project to suck an egg. Such was their ire that the rest of the commissioners wrote a dissenting report correcting Warren’s version. Then again, Warren will fit right in with the baby daddies, slumlords, tax evaders, and mockers of the mentally disabled who currently pollute the White House. (more)
– ”While the general consensus seems to be that Warren will get the chance to head the consumer-centered agency she claims to have come up with, it has not gone unnoticed that the Obama administration appears to be dragging its feet on her nomination.” TheDC’s Amanda Carey can tell you why: Warren is an obnoxious human being. “[She] has gotten major criticism in the way she’s carried out her duties,” George Mason law professor Todd Zywicki told TheDC. “There are serious concerns about her impartiality and that she uses these jobs as a platform for self promotion.” A bankruptcy attorney who worked with Warren on the National Bankruptcy Review Commission added his own anecdotes to claims that Warren is only in this for the chance at a daytime talk show. For example: When it came time for the committee to draft its report, Warren hijacked the process, substantially rewrote several sections, and told everyone else involved in the project to suck an egg. Such was their ire that the rest of the commissioners wrote a dissenting report correcting Warren’s version. Then again, Warren will fit right in with the baby daddies, slum lords, tax evaders, and mockers of the mentally disabled who currently pollute the White House.
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As my time at Medill comes to end, I am reminded of an article that I read last year, just weeks before I moved to Chicago and took the plunge into graduate school. Michael Lewis, then a senior editor at The New Republic, wrote an editorial in 1993 titled, “J-school Confidential,” taking the position that journalism schools refused to call a spade a spade. (more)
A textbook tactic of statist radicals in America is the systematic character assassination of their enemies as racists. Loathe to engage their intellectual opponents in a real discussion of the issues, lest the radicals should be perceived for what they are and lose the fight to bring America under their heel, they prefer instead to slander their opponents, to intimidate and shout them down, and to destroy their credibility with whatever lies or twisted propaganda they can muster in a never-ending witch-hunt. (more)
Progressive ‘journalists’ coordinated smear against critics of Rev. Wright — Reporters harangue a sweaty Robert Gibbs after Obama mischaracterizes fight over unemployment benefits — Dueling Tea Party leaders channel Hamilton and Burr (sort of!) — Congressman points out that signs heralding stimulus are not a good use of the stimulus — How is Obamacare helping FLOTUS? Oh right, it’s not — Cops don’t want to be filmed doing anything ever again (more)
It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacher’s rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama’s campaign. (more)
On Saturday night, April 24, 2010, five days before John Edwards’s mistress Rielle Hunter sat down with Oprah to talk about the by-then-infamous sex tape and other embarrassments that had destroyed his political career, the former presidential candidate showed up at the West End Wine Bar in downtown Durham, North Carolina. It was around ten o’clock, and Edwards wanted a glass of wine after finishing dinner with friends at a nearby restaurant. (more)
Elena Kagan, President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, seems to have prepared for her nomination since high school, studiously avoiding stating her views on all but a few issues. (more)
President Obama’s new Nuclear Posture Review has succeeded mightily in muddying the clear waters. He says we will not use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear power. Except Iran. Except North Korea. If we are attacked with biological or chemical weapons, we will not retaliate with nuclear weapons. Is this a green light for another attack on the homeland? And what are the former captive nations of Europe supposed to think? Does any NATO member—like Poland, like Estonia—sleep more soundly with this ringing declaration of confusion, this uncertain trumpet? (more)
“For a long time now, there’s been too much secrecy in this city,” President Obama said at the beginning of his administration. And much rhetoric followed about transparency and open government. It didn’t happen. (more)
Over the past several weeks President Obama has made the line “Congress owes the American people a final up-or-down vote” central to his pitch for final action on health care reform. It’s how he describes the complicated process of reconciliation. It’s very smart. (more)
In case you missed it (though I don’t know how that you could), the big debate now rocking the insular Washington, D.C., journalistic community involves writer and blogger Andrew Sullivan and whether Sullivan is or is not an anti-Semite. This because of an essay about Sullivan published in the New Republic by that magazine’s long-time literary editor Leon Wieseltier. (more)
Abstract: In the real world, as opposed to what French President Nicolas Sarkozy calls President Barack Obama’s "virtual world," America faces the reality of Iran’s intransigence and aggressiveness; China’s headlong pursuit of its own national, regional, and global interests; Russia’s determination to regain its Near Abroad; the Arab states’ refusal to accept any kind of a reasonable settlement of the kind that Israel has already offered under several governments; Syria’s designs on Lebanon; and Hugo Chávez’s designs on the weaker countries in Latin America. President Obama’s foreign policy agenda of gradual American retreat will have inexorable consequences: When erstwhile allies see the American umbrella being withdrawn, they will have to accommodate themselves to those from whom we were protecting them. If Obama proves impervious to empirical evidence and experience, all these accommodations, the weakening of alliances, the strengthening of centers of adversarial power in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Caracas, and elsewhere will continue until we are awakened by some cataclysm. (more)
Abstract: What do conservatives want? To be free, to live virtuous and productive lives, to be secure from threats beyond and within our borders, and to live in a society that sustains and encourages these aspirations: freedom, virtue, safety–goals reflected in the libertarian, traditionalist, and national security dimensions of the conservative movement and coalition. But to achieve these perennial goals, conservatives must communicate in language that connects with the great majority of the American people in all stations of life. Virtually all conservatives hold in common the conviction that there is indeed an "eternal meaning." The recent past has been unsettling to American conservatives, but in the words of William F. Buckley Jr. nearly 50 years ago, "the wells of regeneration are infinitely deep." (more)
