You’d think that a man who spends each Tuesday wondering who he’s going to kill next wouldn’t have much patience with the man who wants to take his job. But President Obama apparently had too much on his plate to bother showing up for the debate last night. Or maybe he had so much fun…
Author: Alan Vanneman
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are very different from you and me. They’re totally obnoxious
Chrystia Freeland has scored big time with her portrait of complaining plutocrats in this week’s New Yorker, focusing on Leon Cooperman, an amiable, sort of, billionaire who compulsively refers to President Obama as “a man who never worked a day in his life”—because, according to Cooperman, if you’ve never run your own business, you’ve never…
Jeffrey to Bibi: Nice Jeffrey, Bibi!
On Sunday, Jeffrey Goldberg took Israeli Prime Minister Bib Netanyahu to task for “three mistakes and one achievement”: In re: Prime Minister Netanyahu’s handling of the Iran crisis: 1) Netanyahu shouldn’t have waved around that cartoonish drawing on the podium of the United Nations. It made him look unserious, and a man in his position…
Sachal Vasandani—vocal on “Monk’s Dream”
Sinatra meets Monk? Well, why not? I seldom resist a Monk vocal. Jeb Patton, piano; David Wong, bass; Kendrick Scott, drums. Pittsburgh, April 2011. Posted by Sachal Vasandani
Pseudo-New Yorker
Legal humor here. “Trust me, dude. You do not want to elect this guy President.” “Let’s just say that ‘Lost’ was not entirely fiction.” “We’re either going to be very, very rich or else we’ll end up as the set for one dynamite episode of ‘The Twilight Zone’.” “Those Cayman accounts are just pocket…
Best ever?
Slate magazine publishes what Sherlock Holmes used to call an agony column, “Dear Prudence”.* I don’t know if today’s entry is the best ever, but it’s awfully good: “Help! My husband’s mistress hit me in the face with a rock!” I was in a bar once, and a guy at the bar who was chugging…
More from Politico
Mike Allen, Jonathan Martin, and Jim Vandehei explain why Mitt is such a fuck-up. The piece is an extended sop to Republicans, quoting a near-endless series of Romney pals, advisors, and staffers on how Mitt is this fantastic, fantastic guy who would make a fantastic, fantastic president, if only he would stop stepping on his…
James Asher, not knowing nuance though it gnaw him on the ass
“jimomensko.com” points us to a memo issued by James Asher, Washington bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers, which included the following warning his staff: Part of our job is to capture what people really mean, not catch them in a gotcha misstatement or an inelegant remark. Nuance matters. To ensure that we don’t leave truth on…
A meme that cries out for wider application
Arts and Letters Daily points us to a lengthy and satisfying review of Donald Weinstein’s Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet at the Lapham Quarterly. The review is unsigned, which apparently is how they do things there. Like not a few religious reformers, Savonarola worked the citizens of a city (in his…
Whither Republicans?
Is it too soon to wonder about what’s going to happen to the Republican Party after the defeat of Mitt Romney? Well, yes, it is, but what the fuck, it’s fun, so let’s do it. Mitt really put his foot in it, or on it, with his now famous though beginning to recede a bit…