NYT’s Matt Bai, today, describing Podesta re Obama’s supposed missing mojo: Mr. Podesta believes that his most consequential decisions on domestic policy stemmed from one overarching conviction — that the president’s most important job in a crisis, requiring nearly single-minded attention, was to pass huge legislation. “By focusing on getting big legislative accomplishments, which was understandable, they necessarily gave up a larger image of him as president,” [...]
Charles Krauthammer and I concur, today, on the state of the Obama administration in light of the upcoming, much anticipated midterm election that will supposedly determine the fate of the known universe. It’s a none-too-comfortable alignment – he, along with Newt, cause a particularly visceral nausea in me – but I’m nonetheless in total agreement with his major premise, that is, Obama and his political team are playing chess while nearly everyone else in Washington is playing checkers.
Believe it or not, today marks the end of the first half of 2010, or at least it does in my book – six months down, six to go. I’m using the midway point to list a few of my personal favorite encounters thus far, as I seem to always forget the earlier months when compiling year-end best-of lists and the like. Best novel: Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City (Doubleday, 2009) Best album: Emeralds, Does It Look Like I’m Here? (Editions Mego, [...]
Progressive journalists — God bless ‘em — are making me ill. Rachel Maddow and her mock Oval Office address was difficult to watch without having to swallow a mouthful of vomit. But Dan Froomkin’s HuffPo bit is simply too much to bear: “How unmoored from reality are Obama and his top advisers to think that some pretty words with so little substance could accomplish so [...]
Read with interest last night Sasha Frere-Jone’s take on radio’s future via the internets. He discusses in detail all the fancy algorithms and whatnot that make “you the D.J.” with Pandora, Spotify, MOG, etc. That’s all well and good I suppose, but if I were so lucky as to be a real D.J., I’d like to actually pick and choose the songs I play based on my personal thoughts, feelings, and musical instincts, not an algorithm. (I must admit that I was indeed [...]
If you missed it in last Sunday’s WaPo, I urge you to read Howell Raines’ op-ed, in which he more or less issued a call-to-arms — an “either with us, or against us”, throw-down-the-gauntlet moment — with respect to accredited journalists’ refusal to report the verifiable fact that FoxNews is biased and untrustworthy. To wit: For the first time since the yellow journalism of a century ago, the United States has a major news organization devoted [...]