The Herald
(Sharon,
Pennsylvania)
On the howl page of a great American daily, echoes
of the Obama economic plan, also known as
the Economics of the Magic Wand:
Why would anyone be against American taxes being spent on
ourselves; isn’t this why we pay taxes?
As long as the pork and earmarks mean my tax dollars are spent
here in the U.S.A., I don’t care what the earmarks are. If it means
family breadwinners aren’t getting laid off then spend, spend and
spend.
When the economy is doing bad give us lots of pork barrel
spending. When the economy is good then cut out the pork from the
bills and budget.
(March 10,
2009)
New Republic
A carefully researched feuilleton on the friendship
and co-conspiracy of former FBI director Louis Freeh
and Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al
Saud, Esq. reveals mysteries of etiquette and
gourmandizing that bring back memories of dinner at
the London home of Madonna:
A friendship soon blossomed. Bandar would drop by Freeh’s
office, where he alone was permitted to smoke cigars. Freeh, in
turn, would visit Bandar at his McLean, Virginia compound, which
featured a 38-room home and a 12-bedroom dormitory for staff. On
visits to the kingdom, Freeh would dine with the royals. At one
dinner in Riyadh, Freeh recalls how “the elegant Saudi
ambassador”—that would be Bandar—“reached his well-manicured hand
into a roast baby camel’s rump, drew out a fistful of meat, and
deposited it on my plate—a great honor.”
(May 6,
2009)
The Hill
Zoological notes for the solons of Washington,
D.C., deposited in the pages of Capitol Hill’s newspaper
of record:
Ali Wentworth, actress and wife of ABC’s “This Week” host George
Stephanopoulos, doesn’t hold back. During her weekly appearance on
Oprah’s “Friday Live” last week, she revealed that she and George
were recently caught having “marital relations” by their 6-year-old
daughter, Elliott.
When Elliott asked, “Daddy, what are you doing to Mommy?” Daddy
was temporarily speechless, but Wentworth responded brightly,
“Daddy’s just tickling me.”
The subterfuge didn’t last, though, because the ABC newsman, who
quit his White House spinning job years ago and now uncovers (if
that’s the right word) the truth, corrected her, saying, “We’re
making love.” Wentworth has talked frankly about sex on the “Friday
Live” show.
Last October she discussed pornography and sex addiction in
light of actor David Duchovny’s stint in rehab. Wentworth told
viewers she’s fine with porn, but would not be fine if her husband
visited an X-rated Internet chat room. That would be cheating, she
claimed.
“I like it,” Wentworth said of sex. “I don’t love it. I don’t
need to have it 10 times a day. I’m happier with a Klondike bar
sometimes.”
(April 14,
2009)
The Spectator
(UK)
The editor of the famed British
weekly asks minicon David Frum(p) to comment on the
state of American conservatism toward the end of the
Prophet Obama’s first 100 days, and what does he get
for his hospitality? More of young David’s
narcissism:
I’ll make some claims on behalf of the website I edit, a forum
for conservative reform and renewal titled NewMajority.com, which
has run innovative and courageous pieces by young writers and
veteran public servants.
(April 18,
2009)
Countdown with Keith Olbermann
(MSNBC)
A Miss Janeane Garofalo, possibly a historian on
the faculty of the University of California
at Berkeley, puts the recent tax
protesters in historic perspective while making Mr.
Keith Olbermann’s knees knock:
“Let’s be very honest about what this is about. It’s not about
bashing Democrats. It’s not about taxes. They have no idea what the
Boston tea party was about. They don’t know their history at all.
This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism
straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of tea-bagging
rednecks.”
(April 16,
2009)
New York Times
As the recession grinds on, the venerable Times
reports the moral costs of economic slow down in the
Hawkeye State, where homosexual couples, all 23
of them, were forced to live in sin for 72 more
hours:
Licenses for same-sex marriages were supposed to be issued in
Iowa starting this Friday. But because of a crimped state budget,
court employees will be on mandatory furlough that day and the
courts will be closed. Gay couples cannot start filing for their
licenses until Monday.
(April 24,
2009)
Harvard Crimson
A promising investigative journalist working for
the student gazette of Harvard State
University passes on a controversial e-mail
from that great university’s Muslim chaplain, the
Rev. Taha Abdul-Basser (Class of ’96), wherein the holy
man puts in a good word for haria law’s injunction
to butcher a lapsed Mohammedan if the slacker refuses
to return to the faith and pray in the
now-familiar bottoms-up fashion:
There is a great wisdom (hikma) associated with the established
and preserved position (capital punishment [for apostasy]), and so,
even if it makes some uncomfortable in the face of hegemonic modern
human-right discourse, one should not dismiss it out of
hand.
(April 14,
2009)
University of
Chicago Magazine
In the correspondence section where old Maroons
gather in the afterglow of days gone by, Michael from
San Francisco remains true blue for the North
Vietnamese while still unafraid of those business-school
ruffians:
There is something unsettling about the cover feature on David
Booth. Something is missing in the story of a student arriving at
the U of C in 1969 with the campus and country seething with
turmoil, and the only mention of Vietnam is how school kept him
from the war. To speak only of the stimulating atmosphere and the
great departmental parties, while thousands of others, mostly of a
different color and economic class, were being maimed and killed,
is to display a convenient myopia. Those of us who marched at the
time recall the appearance of business-school students, from their
distant precincts, to obstruct the protests to a brutal war.
Michael Brant, AB’70, AM’82
San Francisco
(March/April 2009)
From the Archives
Timeless Tosh from Current Wisdoms
Past
(June 1989)
Philadelphia
Inquirer
Mr. Helmut Raether of Deutsche Presse-Agentur transforms
anthropology into Art:
TOKYO—Finding somewhere to answer nature’s call can be confusing
in Japan, where a public convenience isn’t always quite what it
seems. The latest luxury toilets that have been replacing the
humble public latrines up and down the country have names like
“Marble Pocket” and “Charm Station,” and newspaper reports of their
inauguration read like reviews of theater premieres.…Users spend
more than $2 to enter one of the cubicles, each of which is named
after a famous brand of perfume. A toilet receptionist instead of
the more familiar attendant ushers the customers into one of six
rooms, each of which measures 3.3 square yards and contains every
comfort, including a hair dryer.
The “lingering time” tends to be longer than in conventional
conveniences, and the receptionist has noticed that many visitors
are lulled to sleep by the gentle strains of Baroque music that
issue from loudspeakers installed in the cubicles.
(February 19,
1989)
New Republic
The horrible depths to which Messrs. Collier and
Horowitz sank, as reported by Paul Berman whilst reviewing
their latest monograph, Destructive Generation: Second
Thoughts About the Sixties:
Peter Collier and David Horowitz’s new book presents itself as
the anti-60s memoir, especially anti-Gitlin and anti-Hayden, who
are excoriated for harboring excessive loyalties to the past. Where
Collier and Horowitz tread, nostalgia does not bloom. Nor did their
own second conversions bring them to graduate school, feminist
family life, brown rice, or basketball; or to any other green and
shady place likely to seem respectable to New Leftist eyes, such as
tomato farming or Hasidism. The authors became
Republicans.
(April 24,
1989)
