Never let it be said that the folks over at the New York Post aren’t fearless journalists:
Making fun of mafia figures for losing their homes is pretty bold. I glanced at the covers of the Times and the Journal this morning, and neither of those big shot publications had the courage to go there. Meanwhile, those children are some amazing specimens. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them before here.
Via Ben Smith, Obama tells it like it is:
Obama also took a question on Richardson’s new, clean shave.
The president-elect is “deeply disappointed with the loss of the beard.”
“The whole Western, rugged look was working for him,” Obama said. “Maybe it was scratchy when he kissed his wife.”
I was really pulling for Richardson to land Clinton’s job until I found out he’d shaved the beard. Our country deserves better.
In the Kevin Drum post I quoted before, he linked repeatedly to Climate Progress, “an insider’s view of climate change, politics and solutions”. The lack of a comma after the word ‘politics’ in the blog’s subtitle might lead one to conclude that this is the view of a British insider, but the author, Joseph Romm, is actually a quasi-illiterate American. Reading his blog is no picnic. His sentences are put together poorly, and almost every post is a scattered collection of links to his other posts, filled with indiscernible jargon.
The bad news is that I recommend you take a look at it anyway. This guy knows a lot about climate change and energy policy. Here’s a pretty staggering claim:
In the past three decades, electricity per capita has stayed flat in Californian while it has risen 60% in the rest of the country. If all Americans had the same per capita electricity demand as Californians, we would cut electricity consumption 40%. And if all of America adopted the same energy efficiency policies that California is now putting in place, the country would never have to build another power plant.
As you can see, he likes to put things in bold, or sometimes italics, and his links are a hideous, unreadable green, which is unfortunate, because there’s hardly any text that isn’t linked. This is the least aesthetically pleasing blog I’ve ever seen. But I’m afraid it demands reading anyway.
White House Press Secretary Dana Perino is still hot.
Like me, you’ve probably been wondering why pundits haven’t been using the term ‘douche-nozzle’ this election cycle. Never fear:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgHHX9R4Qtk&hl=en&fs=1]
(h/t Ben Smith)
Campbell Brown goes after the Palin press blackout:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSNkloIFTQ0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&fs=1]
As I have pointed out before, I have a soft spot for Campbell, but I’m afraid I have to disagree with her here. I am as outraged about her being hidden from the press as the next 16th-century-ruler-turned-U.S.-political-blogge, but I think attributing it to sexism is absurd - though she is far from the first to make this claim. It might be the case that the McCain camp thinks they can get away with sequestering her because people in general are sexist, but there is no reason to think they are themselves suffering from sexist delusions.
McCain’s people want to shield Sarah Palin from reporters not because they think women can’t handle tough questions, but because they think Sarah Palin can’t handle tough questions. And they’re presumably right. She certainly has no experience dealing with the national media. She apparently had almost no information about the world beyond North America until a few weeks ago. She didn’t look very adept in the Gibson interview. And there is a mountain of scandals and patent lies about which no sensible campaign would want her questioned.
Sexism is at worst a pretext here. The McCain camp will keep Palin hidden until the media makes them suffer for it. This has nothing to do with their views on women, and everything to do with their knowing what’s good for them.
While writing that post, I came across two wonderful things:
Top 10 Hillary Clinton Pantsuits - proof, if more were needed, that Hillary’s dress sense is an object of ridicule because it is ridiculous.
The Wearing of Pants - splendid.
I must object to my colleague’s post on Dana Perino. It’s sexist, it trivializes the important political issues of the day, and it ignores the fact that all discussion of hotness in American politics must begin and end with CNN’s Campbell Brown:
