Mar
20
The Mystery Obama Ad
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Here it is…the Obama ad that is causing all the buzz. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just watch it so when someone brings it up you can appear to be in-the-know.)
Loading...Mar
20
Congress Doing — Part of — Its Job
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Michael Winship
Next time you feel as if there’s actually an end in sight, hug a Democratic member of Congress. Yeah, you’re right. On second thought, just send them some flowers or a fruit basket. A nice note will do.
I wasn’t contemplating a legislative group hug specifically because they’re Democrats. No, it’s because with an end to one-party domination of both the executive and the legislature, barely three months into its new session, Congress finally is fulfilling its oversight duties. No longer is it blowing an official air kiss to every gutter ball rolling up Capitol Hill from 1600 Pennsylvania.
Right now, this new assertiveness is most readily viewed in the current flap over the Justice Department’s firing of eight US attorneys, allegedly for either prosecuting Republicans too robustly or NOT prosecuting Democrats with an equivalent vigor. I first wrote about this the week of January 22. “Keep an eye on this one,” I suggested, having just a hunch and no idea it would turn into the scandal it has become. (You can read that column here.)
Mar
20
DocDump
Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments
The Justice Department unloaded 3,000 pages of emails and memos on the House and Senate judiciary committees last night. The good stuff will be emerging throughout the day as people with far more time and patience than me wade through the documents. (TPM Muckraker will be a good source.) But here’s one that I came across that I think that says a lot. It’s an email from Michael Elston in the Justice Department to the recently departed Kyle Sampson, reporting that US Attorney Kevin Ryan (northern California) is trying to reassure the Administration he is still, to borrow a phrase we’ve heard a lot lately, “a loyal Bushie.” (Click for a bigger image.)
If you want to see for yourself, the documents are posted here.
Mar
13
Middle East Theater: In the Final Act, America Self-Destructs
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Michael Winship
I love the theater and never come late. Or try not to. I had a girlfriend many years ago who so consistently was late for the theater I fantasized about publishing a book of the first acts of plays we’d missed because of her pokiness.
I’ll go see almost anything. I once attended a revival of “West Side Story” performed entirely by six-year-olds. The gang war between the Sharks and Jets was interrupted for a juice box break. Adorable.
But I’m especially a sucker for a one-man or one-woman performance. If I’d been around in the days when Mark Twain went from town to town reading chapters from “Huckleberry Finn” or Charles Dickens acted out “The Death of Nancy” from “Oliver Twist,” I would have been fighting for seats up front and on the aisle.
Solo performers are the matadors of the stage. I’ve seen some great ones, including Hal Holbrook impersonating the aforementioned Mr. Twain (he’s been doing it longer than Twain actually did), the British actor Emlyn Williams as the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, Anna Deavere Smith’s remarkable one-woman, journalistic meditations on race riots in Brooklyn and Los Angeles.
Mar
6
The Voyage of the Snark
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
by Michael Winship
“If you can’t say anything nice about someone, come sit next to me.” So read an embroidered pillow on a sofa in the salon of one of Washington’s great dames, the late Alice Roosevelt Longworth.
The outspoken daughter of Teddy Roosevelt and wife of House Speaker Nicholas Longworth, she lived to the venerable age of 96. Mrs. Longworth was sometimes described as “the other Washington Monument,” known for her acerbic comments about the politicians of days past and present.
President Calvin Coolidge, she declared, looked as if he’d been “weaned on a pickle.” New York Governor and twice-presidential candidate Thomas Dewey resembled “the little man on the wedding cake,” a description he never quite lived down. Herbert Hoover, she said, was nowhere near as exciting as a Hoover vacuum cleaner. “Of course, it’s electric,” she explained.
Compare those ripostes to the recent “bon mots” of others.
On the air February 25, Fox News Channel’s Brit Hume called Democratic, anti-Iraq war Congressman Jack Murtha “dotty” and said, “This guy is long past the day when he had anything but the foggiest awareness of what the heck is going on in the world.”
According to the New York Post, at an editorial board meeting there last week former House Speaker Newt Gingrich took a shot at Hillary Clinton. The paper reported that, “Asked whether Americans are ready to elect Rudy Giuliani — a leader, the questioner noted, whom Ed Koch had called a ‘nasty man’ — Gingrich shot back, ‘As opposed to a nasty woman?’”
Then, of course, there’s that pinup dream of the right-wing, Ann Coulter, who elevated the level of discourse at last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference in DC by calling John Edwards “a faggot.” Thus, Ms. Coulter’s quest to model her life after that of Mother Teresa’s continues unimpeded.
Mar
1
A shallow act of desperation
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
When I was in college at Bowdoin, fraternities (which were required by the school to be coed) were on the decline. Only about half the student body belonged but still, being asked to join held some allure–at least in my mind. As an awkward, insecure kid from northern Maine, I wasn’t exactly a star with the fraternity crowd. Not being asked to pledge wasn’t all that big a deal, but it did hurt a little bit when I was approached by a member of the least popular frat on campus and asked if I would take my meals there because they needed a minimum number of people to qualify with food services. They didn’t want me to join, they just wanted my meal ticket. Ouch.