Recently (well, yesterday), I commented on a long article in the New Yorker by Evan Osnos on Samantha Power, our ambassador to the UN, whom I described unkindly as “President Obama’s whom-shall-we-invade-next gal about town”, making further fun of her (as who would not?) for not knowing that plants “breathe” carbon dioxide rather than oxygen….
Columbia law school: Overprivileged white students protest being overprivileged white students
It’s tough being white at the Columbia University School of Law. You hang with your hip minority friends, crowded four to a room in Yonkers and then go home to the mid-town duplex your aunt is lending you. Guilt! You eat out at hip ethnic restaurants1before they become trendy and notice that your hip ethnic…
Margaret Hartmann, Margaret Hartmann!
New York magazine’s Margaret Hartmann gets my cheer of the week for noting the resurgence of “Mittmentum” as my man Mitt makes it known that he’s unimpressed by the emerging Republican field for 2016, something that he’s been doing on a monthly basis since last summer. Back then, Mitt allowed as how he might run…
North Texas Jazz Chamber Music—“Brilliant Corners”
Fuzzy widescreen, nice sound. Chris Reardon, tenor sax; Patrick Carr, piano; Rasmus Blixt, drums; Jimin Lee, vocals: Brian Casey, contrabass. Kenton Hall, University of North Texas on September 19, 2012. Posted by Brian Casey
Pseudo New Yorker
Legal humor here. “You know what they say, Ferguson: ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress.’ Oh, and suck on this: ‘O body swayed to music, O brightening glance How can…
Alan Vanneman, a month late and a dollar short
(OK, I understand that, on the web, 5 seconds ago is so 5 minutes ago, so, by that count, the following is a hundred years old, but so what.) I was just cruising n’ perusing my sometime man Dave Wiegel today, who, I found, took issue last week with “The media’s stupid coverage of a…
Dianne Feinstein, profile in about as much courage as we’re going to find these days
Like a lot of people, I’ve felt that Cal. Sen. Dianne Feinstein never objected to the CIA spying on people until she found out they were spying on her. Nonetheless, the senator has done something, in a city that, when it comes to the staggering series of crimes, lies, and abuses that have occurred during…
Dan Drezner, kickin’ John Kerry’s butt
There was a time, so long ago, when John Kerry thought himself quite the war protester, quite the moralist, throwing away his Vietnam War medals, or at least copies of them, to show what he thought of Washington incompetence and hypocrisy. Well, now he’s personifying the same. According to Josh Rogin, reporting at the Bloomsberg…
The U.S. is a country of peace. A piece of you here, a piece of you there
Bill Maher and John Cleese have a mostly enjoyable rap on “political correctness,” which of course they don’t care for. I agree with about 90% of what they have to say, but when Bill brings up his take on Islam—the “piece of you here” bit alluded to in the head—I felt a certain disenchantment. It’s…
When is a Nazi war criminal not a Nazi war criminal? When there’s no evidence that he is a Nazi war criminal
Congress has acquired for itself a fair amount of ridicule for boldly cutting off Social Security benefits for four, count ‘em, four seriously aging dudes living outside the U.S. who may have committed war crimes in World War II. This bold action was the result of an article from the Associated Press saying that back…