Yearly Archives 2007

In the 70s, when reliable long distance phone service was still novel to the strong consumer-base that was my grandparents' generation, the phone company had a big ad campaign urging people to "Reach Out and Touch Someone" ("Reach out, reach out and just say Hi," was the next line in the jingle.) The spirit was very similar to the wave of online photo-sharing ads that you see now on TV from Time Warner, Kodak, Verizon, etc. (So I guess the key to marketing new technologies is "Dangle Grandchildren.") But conversations over distance don't impress us anymore. And today I'm wondering if they don't promise something they can't deliver - like, say, reality. I'm thinking about Mamadou Soumare and his wife Fatoumata who died in the horrible fire in the Bronx this week. His last conversation with her was by cell phone, and she knew she might not make it out…

What makes me gladdest about the Scooter Libby verdict is that of course Cheney and Bush are tarnished by this. After this sedate but excellent circus, only the most partisan ostriches could think there was not a high level plot to discredit a respectable war critic by any means necessary. I feel silly even saying it aloud - it's common perception and that's very very satisfying, even if not litigable. An acquittal would have cast doubt over the common perception, so it's not like the true court and the court of perception don't have a vital link - but after everything we've been through, I don't think there's a doubt in people's mind about who was pulling the strings. And that helps. From NYT analysis: "In the end, after a painstaking, 10-day dissection of the evidence, the 11 jurors found the case presented by the prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald inescapable:…

It's tempting to see the post-Goldwater Rise of the Right as a monolithic and millennial trend whose ravages are nearly irreversible and whose decline is still not much more than a glimmer in Harry Reid's eye. But Sidney Blumenthal's analysis of Gerald Ford and his differences with the GOP elite of the last 25 years offers a portrait that is compelling for at least two reasons: it's a more believable idea than the lockstep consensus that so often appears to guide the right you love to hate; and it's comforting because it suggests that nuance and judgment aren't missing from politics as it is, only from politics as it's portrayed and purveyed by so many of the powerful, including a complicit press. Here are just a couple of clips. Read the whole piece ... [Ford's] last testament was a final act of political finesse. Obeying the unwritten protocol of former…

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