Liberal Talk Radio

Not to toot my own horn, but Kinsley makes a point in today’s Slate that I made a couple of weeks ago — namely, that the President’s daughters’ bad behavior reflects badly on the President’s commitment to America’s war effort.  Kinsley writes: [Bush's] daughters are over 21, and he can’t control them, but that doesn’t [...]

As part of some general housekeeping, I finally got around to reading some old issues of the Sunday Times Magazine. Since people often slag the Mag for being behind the times on trends, this had the added bonus of being behind the times on something that is already behind the times. Sometimes life is perverse [...]

Follow up to the Contrarian’s piece on life-extending calorie-restricted diets. In today’s NYT, there’s a bit about a study involving rhesus monkeys. Check out the sample diets offered, one demonstrating a calorie restricted menu of 2000 calories, the other the “average” diet of 3000 calories. The diets were prepared by one Mike Linksvayer. Now, I [...]

Fascinating piece in the NYT about the growing (and apparently already widespread) use of hand sanitizer among politicians. As you know, I’m a germ-o-phobe myself. Still, I hate hand sanitizer (and its evil cousin — the sanitizer spray they use at the gym). Why? Purell and its ilk are anti-bacterial. That is, they only kill [...]

What a bunch of Frenchies WA State’s farmers are turning in to. [That's right, I just called you French.  What you got?  What you got farm boy?  You gonna bring it?  You wanna piece?  Huh? HUH!?] A cavalcade of slow-moving farm vehicles will take to the streets of downtown Seattle Thursday afternoon to support the [...]

Did you realize that 8 G.I.s just died in one day, the highest single-day toll since 2005? Maybe not, since the article was buried on A12 . . . point being that I think there’s something to the idea that anti-GOP stories are coming too fast, too furiously and, most of all, too close together [...]

If Fashion Week has started to resemble the red carpet at the Oscars (a point amplified by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders on last week’s The Treatment), then the United Nations General Assembly meetings are not far behind. For a taste, grab your jaundiced monocle and join Ben McGrath in this week’s Talk of the Town: So many [...]

I love pears as much as the next guy, but there’s something fishy here — you mean to tell us that farmers exist completely outside any market forces? I don’t quite buy it: The pear growers here in Lake County waited decades for a crop of shapely fruit like the one that adorned their orchards [...]

Somewhere in Princeton, a lightbulb goes off in Paul Krugman’s head, “A hook for my next column!”: There is not much choice. There is not, because we have screwed up. Not a little but a lot. No country in Europe has screwed up as much as we have. It can be explained. We have obviously [...]

I don’t know if it’s a truism in public relations but it should be — you only get one chance to spin the story: As a politician, former Gov. James E. McGreevey of New Jersey was a master of message discipline, a candidate with an uncanny ability to restrict his public statements to preordained talking [...]