A three-hundred foot section of a ramp leading to a 9.6-mile bridge over the Songhua River collapsed today, nine months after the bridge opened, the New York Times reports. It’s the sixth major bridge to collapse this year. Last year, a crash involving a brand-new high speed rail line cost the lives of 40 people….
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Imagine if his position hadn’t been his position
Over at the New York Times’ “Room for Debate” page, Ramesh Ponnuru tries to explain how Todd Akin ran off the rails: Akin’s position on abortion inspired some of the controversy, of course. So did his clear implication that some rapes are not real rapes. He managed, however, to add more toxic ingredients to the…
Richard Posner, so not one for strumming the guitar
How Much Is Enough? ask Brits Robert and Edward Skidelsky, father and son, the dad being well known as the author of a famous, three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes and the son a not as well known philosopher. How Much Is Enough? springs off an essay Keynes wrote back in the day, imagining life…
President Obama, learning you can’t please all the psychos all the time
God knows he’s tried. President Obama has ordered more hits than Al Capone. The problem is, he wants to take credit for them! And that’s pissed off a gang of ex-spooks and SEALS and other wet work types, who have formed a little gang that calls itself the Special Operations Opsec Education Fund, set up…
Oh, those arrogant Chinese!
Over at the Dish, Andy free during August, Gwynn Guilford posts a rap bemoaning China’s “insularity and paranoia,” giving as an example the reasonably believable “fact” that everyone in China believes that 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by U.S. forces was deliberate. Well, that does sound a little insular and paranoid, but,…
Ryan Crocker: the silence of a wise man
Ryan Crocker, retiring U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and former ambassador to Iraq, where he presided over President Bush’s “surge,” might have a few interesting things to say about U.S. foreign policy in the post 9/11 decade. And, in a recent interview in the New York Times, he does, if “vague and cautious” means the same…
Damn Hippies at the U.S. Department of Agriculture
Well, they had to put them somewhere, didn’t they? Every administration has a turkey farm, the place where they put politically connected incompetents and other “sensitive” individuals. During the Reagan Administration it was the Education Department. Under Clinton it was the public affairs office of the Department of Defense, where Linda met Monica. Under Obama…
David Rieff, assigning blame where blame is due, some of the time
Over at Foreign Affairs, David Rieff has a rather portentous, even penumbral, take on world events, notably the concurrent U.S. disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, taking a few pokes at the liberal optimism that brought these about. Dave’s nut graph, or perhaps “money shot,” is quite prolonged, but, well, in for a penny, in for…
Which of these three is different from the others?
Last week the New York Times broke an important story, on the widespread practice of the willingness of the press, including the New York Times itself, to let political and government officials write their own quotes. “Quote approval is standard practice for the Obama campaign, used by many top strategists and almost all midlevel aides…
Tom Edsall, not really getting a handle on the whole apples to apples thing
Over at the New York Times (yeah, the New York Times), in an entry titled “The Politics of Anything Goes,” Tom Edsall notes, or rather conjectures, that the Obama campaign is spending lots of money on ads dissing Mitt Romney, ads that “target not only whites without college degrees, but in particular white men without…