Archive for 2010
February 9, 2010
REVIEWING THE REVIEWERS: A roundup of book reviews from all over.
Robert Gibbs showed the words “hope” and “change” on his hand as he started his daily briefing with reporters on Tuesday.
Many in the room, where President Barack Obama had spoken just moments before about the need for bipartisanship, groaned at the political shot.
Leaving aside its lameness — stepping on the President’s message, and demonstrating, once again, that Robert Gibbs is never intentionally funny — it really seems to me that bringing up the whole “hope and change” schtick nowadays isn’t doing much for the White House, but rather is simply reminding people of how the original promise of this Administration has failed to bear fruit.
RE-ENGINEERING the human immune system.
ERIC S. RAYMOND: Don’t Dis The Wiccans!
BOEING FLIES its biggest plane to date.
IN THE GUARDIAN: If you’re going to do good science, release the computer code too. Thanks to Shannon Love, who found it via Slashdot.
THIRTY KNOTS OF SPEED, in a sailboat.
VERONIQUE DE RUGY ON DEFICITS: The Limits Of Blaming Bush. “In his latest budget request, President Obama added roughly $1.6 trillion in spending over the next ten years on top of what he requested last year. Can President Obama blame that extra $1.6 trillion on former President Bush? No.”
UPDATE: More from Megan McArdle.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Cops lodge felony snowball-throwing charges.
HOW TO GET A DATE. It’s the comments that are more interesting.
VIDEO: Audio Myths Workshop.
THE HORROR OF sexual anorexia.
IN THE MAIL: From Hank Paulson, On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System.
BYRON YORK ON JOHN EDWARDS: Why The Media Ignored A Scandal. “It turned out that many journalists just didn’t want to report the news and didn’t try very hard to uncover the facts.”
BYRON YORK: White House: People Who Criticize Us Are Helping Al Qaeda. They told me if I voted for McCain we’d see for-us-or-against-us jingoism from the White House — and they were right!
NEW YORK TIMES: U.N. Climate Panel and Chief Face Credibility Siege.
LEON WIESELTIER: Andrew Sullivan has a serious problem. “Sullivan is hunting for motives, not reasons; for conspiracies, which is the surest sign of a mind’s bankruptcy. These days the self-congratulatory motto above his blog is ‘Of No Party or Clique,’ but in fact Sullivan belongs to the party of Mearsheimer and the clique of Walt (whom he cites frequently and deferentially), to the herd of fearless dissidents who proclaim in all seriousness, without in any way being haunted by the history of such an idea, that Jews control Washington. . . . And this is not all that is disgusting about Sullivan’s approach. His assumption, in his outburst about ‘the Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing,’ that every thought that a Jew thinks is a Jewish thought is an anti-Semitic assumption, and a rather classical one. Bigotry has always made representatives of individuals, and discerned the voice of the group in the voice of every one of its members. . . . Having demanded that the Jews behave apologetically in America, Sullivan now demands that the United States behave apologetically in the world–that it adjust its relationship with Israel to the preferences of the Muslim peoples. This is a little like decrying the election of a black president because it will inflame white racists. . . . To me, he looks increasingly like the Buchanan of the left.” Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: On consideration, I don’t think this gets it quite right. Andrew certainly has a lot of hate, but unlike Buchanan he seems less . . . fixed in exactly who he hates at any given moment. I think it’s more of a frog-and-scorpion kind of thing and not a traditional idee fixee hatred like anti-semitism.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Dan Riehl: Sullivan is actually not an antisemite.
POLL: “Three-fourths of independents have a favorable view of the tea party movement and say one-party control of the White House and Congress has been bad.”
MEGAN MCARDLE: Shoe, Meet The Other Foot.