Category: long story short

Mark A. R. Kleiman has been following the tree-destruction/collective-punishment story from Iraq and says

Wesley Clark and Joe Lieberman bow out of the Iowa Caucuses to make room for Adam Felber.

We were in a kitchen, me and the two cops, one white and one black. The black one was Colin Powell. We sat down at the table and continued arguing about some system that would allow them to run background checks on people from their squad cars. The cops were against it, saying it would…

A week ago I read in the New York Times (“Republicans Debate Merits of Following Schwarzenegger to the Center”) about a bunch of conservative Republicans spinning Schwarzenegger’s election as a “fluke” (sounding like nothing so much as the spin of the mainstream Democrats here in California) and claiming that his pro-choice and other signal social-liberal…

Why didn’t I … when I had the chance? or, I wish I had kept at that … because I’d be really good at it by now. I should have bought that house that seemed too expensive 15 years ago. Answer: Do it now. Start again. It’s never too late. Now is that time that…

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat has been tracking down some alternative sources for the item about US / coalition troops uprooting orchards in Iraq.

Man, I really feel for Red Sox fans. Martinez is obviously an incredible talent but why was he allowed to stay in to preside over that unraveling? I know the Yanks haven’t won it yet, but it looks like now they might. The cameras focused on a sign reading “Mystique don’t fail me now” and…

Eschaton has the Philadelphia Inquirer running this bit of Becket-like absurdity: “Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he “didn’t want to see any stories” quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used.”…

I knew Al Gore was sunk when Patrick Moynihan, in the course of endorsing Bill Bradley for president in the primaries leading up to 2000, pronounced Al Gore “unelectable.” I didn’t agree that this was necessarily the case, but I did feel that this curse would become a self-fulfilling prophesy. In OpinionJournal, Harold Bloom writes…

I find the whole idea of U.S. troops imposing collective punishment by uprooting longstanding orchards to be sickening on so many levels that I’ve had a hard time coming up with what I want to say about it. Here’s Patrick Neilsen Hayden, borrowed, quoted, and nested: I’ve been trying all day to get my mind…

Sacbee blogger Dan Weintraub reports: The Washington Times speculates that Rep. David Dreier, political-friend-in-chief to the new gov, might challenge Barbara Boxer for the U.S. Senate next year…. [California Insider] Everyone’s trying to read the tea leaves now with Schwarzenegger and just the other day someone was telling me that Dreier could have big ambitions.

Daily Kos: State of the Democratic Race gives a reasonably good overview of Democratic candidate primary strategies and tactics at this sateg in the race.

In Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle, Matier & Ross help get us into the Halloween spirit by reporting on two extremely creepy moments in California politics. Extremely Creepy Moment Number One At a bipartisan post-election party, M&R write: “The 70 or so people at the party also included a number of lobbyists, one of whom went…

Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine notes that the German magazine Bild points to Schwarzenegger’s success (and his “iron will”) in a way that gives him the heeby-jeebies. Jeff’s reaction triggered these thoughts, which I first posted in his comment: It could be seen as a sign of healed national relations that we could elect a German-accented…

Reading around at TPM and Orcinus today I can see the outlines of a White House defense for the burning of deep-cover CIA agent, Valerie Plame. First, they will assert that the two senior administration officials (Possibly I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and Elliott Abrams) who told Robert Novak that Joseph Wilson’s wife was CIA and…

1. Finished the Franken book. That chapter on the Wellstone memorial is amazing. If you read nothing else in the book, read that one chapter. Angry. Honest. Uplifting. 2. Listened to Steve Martin off Fresh Air/NPR. I taped this the other day on my boom box. The tape had Simon and Garfunkel on it and…

Last night while watching the election results and contemplating the inauguration of der Gropenfuhrer, I said to B that my spin on all this was going to be that the energy of the campaign (aside from the fanboy hero-worship) came from an anti-incumbent feeling and frustration with the economy and the budget deficit. Schwarzenegger kept…

owie.

Because I don’t really trust the Diebold voting machine that assured me that my vote this morning had been counted but gave me no receipt and is – as far as I can tell – unaudited and vulnerable to tampering, I’ll put my votes on record here. I voted No on the recall. I’ve never…

The people at NBC want to make you think. You can learn more about life from five minutes of Ed, for example, or Scrubs, than you can from, like, 15 minutes of ABC’s According to Jim. This is all the more especially true for NBC’s news shows. Take, for instance, Tim Russert’s “Meet the Press.”…

It appears from numerous reports that Novak is still working the “slime” angle of the “slime and defend” strategy designed to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, (as partisans, ironically), with his latest broadcast of the name of Plame’s former CIA front company. As a willing tool in some kind of war…