Liberal Talk Radio

Clearly the President should lay off the quips: President Obama’s historic appearance on the “Tonight Show with Jay Leno” was accompanied by a foot-in-the-mouth quip about the Special Olympics he later regretted. Talking about his dismal bowling skills, Obama said he’d been practicing and had gotten his score up to 129. “Oh, no, that’s very [...]

A disclaimer: Although I don’t live in Seattle, and BATP is of course a Seattle-based production, I love Seattle and have visited many times. Some of my best friends live in Seattle! Which is to say, I don’t necessarily understand all of the ins and outs of the demise of the Post-Intelligencer beyond what I [...]

Using the Google Suggest feature (“As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you’re typing and offers suggestions in real time . . . Our algorithms use a wide range of information to predict the queries users are most likely to want to see”), here are the first terms Google suggests if [...]

President Obama owed Huffington Post writer Sam Stein one. Last night, he paid him back: It was a bookend moment. President Obama on Monday evening became the 10th American president to call on Helen Thomas at a White House news conference. And he was the first to call on Sam Stein, a reporter for The [...]

I’m not entirely sure when substituting popular music for actual acting started happening (was it James Van Der Beek’s fault?), but it started bothering me during Grey’s Anatomy — specifically, the final scenes in the final episode of Season 3 (“Didn’t We Almost Have It All?”), when Sandra Oh’s character rips off her wedding dress [...]

Back before HornyManatee.com and ten-digit telephone numbers there was 867-5309: One day five years ago, Mr. Potter, who was living in Weehawken, N.J., and working as a disc jockey for weddings and parties, needed a phone number for his business. On a lark he asked if 867-5309 was available. To his surprise, it was. It [...]

Perhaps Blagojevich didn’t get the fairest treatment but the more he speaks, the clearer it seems that the legislature probably got it right: “Well, baby, we’re out of here,” he said to Louanner Peters, a deputy governor. His entourage hurried him toward his S.U.V. and the airport, reminding him that time might be ticking on [...]

This time, a coordinated message but Vice-President Biden still sounds off key: President Obama branded Wall Street bankers “shameful” on Thursday for giving themselves nearly $20 billion in bonuses as the economy was deteriorating and the government was spending billions to bail out some of the nation’s most prominent financial institutions. “There will be time [...]

But it’s not anything President Obama came up with: “I want to apologize to you for what happened,” he said, looking earnest and speaking as if he felt pretty badly about it all. “But I can’t. Because I did nothing wrong.”

In the Bush Era, cultural critics bent over backwards in perverse contrarian ways to reevaluate the careers of artists who didn’t deserve it: “In the big picture of pop music, I don’t know if what I’ve created is seen as being that important or that necessary, at least not if you ask the experts,” he [...]