Thursday, January 14, 2010
Back-in-Princeton tab dump
I'm back home after a week on the road, and accumulated a few tabs along the way. I know you'll be thrilled.
Gail Collins, columnist for the New York Times, takes a typical Grey Lady shot at Republican candidate Scott Brown and her daughter (bold emphasis added):
Brown, her opponent, is a conservative state senator who believes in waterboarding but not necessarily global warming. When he was 22, he won an “America’s Sexiest Man” contest, the prize for which was $1,000 and a chance to pose naked in a Cosmopolitan magazine centerfold. One of his daughters — this is perhaps the best-known factoid in the campaign — came in somewhere between 13th and 16th on “American Idol.”
“For our family, especially me being on ‘Idol’ but my dad being in politics, there are always so many people who have something negative to say,” Ayla Brown told The Boston Herald this week. Her talent was singing, not sentence construction.
Really? Collins is mocking Ayla Brown's sentence construction? Just another way of saying that Republicans are uneducated, I suppose.
I've never seen a Virgin Mary quite like this one.
Tom Kirkendall, who has chronicled the criminalization of business better than any blogger I know, is all over the latest case of dropped charges eight years after Enron.
Next time you hear some left complain about the "tea parties" as if they were anti-social, send them this link.
"Saint Elizabeth and the Ego Monster": The incredibly disgusting history of the unbelievably sordid Edwards for President campaign. Both John and Elizabeth come off as the worst sort of trash, for example:
Elizabeth’s illness seemed at first to mellow her in the early months of 2005—but not for long. One day, she was on a conference call with the staffers of One America, the political-action committee that was being turned into a vehicle for John’s 2008 bid. There were 40 or 50 people on the line, mostly kids in their twenties being paid next to nothing (and in some cases literally nothing). Elizabeth had been cranky throughout the call, but at the end she asked if her and her husband’s personal health-care coverage had been arranged. Not yet, she was told. There are complications; let’s discuss it after the call. Elizabeth was having none of that. She flew into a rage.
If this isn’t dealt with by tomorrow, everyone’s health care at the PAC will be cut off until it’s fixed, she barked. I don’t care if nobody has health care until John and I do!
The health-care call attained wide infamy in the Edwards camp. The people around them marveled at Elizabeth’s callousness—this from a woman whose family had multiple houses and a net worth in the tens of millions. Yet no one called her out on her behavior, least of all her husband. His default reflex was to mollify her—or avoid her. No one doubted that, as her condition improved, the increase in John’s travel had a lot to do with steering clear of his wife. What they didn’t know was that the road would soon hold other enticements, too.
Remember how closely we dodged the Edwards bullet the next time you think "maybe we should give Eliot Spitzer another chance."
Daniel Henninger think that Republicans need to give Barack Obama more props for the best of his foreign policy decisions.
Attention Massachusettes voters: A completely different reason to vote against Martha Coakley.
Be well.
7 Comments:
By 
Brian Schmidt, at
Fri Jan 15, 11:27:00 AM:
This is more a matter of gender construction than sentence construction, but I think TH wants to say "Scott Brown and HIS daughter."
Not sure I'd agree Collins' column is typical Grey Lady, but it wasn't good. Reads like Maureen Dowd, and we already have too many of her.
By , at
Fri Jan 15, 12:31:00 PM:
If Coakley does indeed lose this election, there will be many excuses made. The Amiraults case won't likely be cited, despite Dorothy Rabinowitz's indefatigable work on behalf of that poor benighted family over the years. Beyond this election, Martha Coakley and the prosecutors who preceded her in the case do have much to answer for.
By 
Dawnfire82, at
Fri Jan 15, 12:36:00 PM:
I wonder... how many other, similar stories exist from the campaigns and lives of politicians who have net yet been publicly disgraced and sold out?
By , at
Fri Jan 15, 12:39:00 PM:
The Anchoress nails Collins:
"Gail Collins:, of the increasingly haphazard NY Times, makes my job easy by being stupid and nasty in one craptacular column, wherein she admits Coakley is a disaster, but gamely shows her non-biased, professional newsgal support for her, anyway by…going after Scott Brown’s kids. Because it’s what people like Collins do. So, stupid enough to back the stupid and nasty Coakley; nasty enough to bring kids into it, yet again. Your honor, I rest my case."
By Simon Kenton, at
Fri Jan 15, 01:40:00 PM:
I wish I could say it beggars belief that what stood between us and an Edwards presidency was the vigorous, principled and courageous journalism of the National Enquirer. It doesn't. But now that it doesn't matter anymore, we have a bold and blunt exploration of the matter from 'real' reporters. "Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?"
By , at
Fri Jan 15, 05:42:00 PM:
The Brown girl does no worse than Gore Vidal on a bad day.
Btw, Tigerhawk, perhaps your own sentence construction could be amended so as not to suggest Collins is criticizing her own daughter? Heh.
By , at
Tue Jan 19, 09:05:00 AM:
after the last decade, anyone who votes or supports the republican party has rocks in their heads, you people do not learn from history, every time you idiots elect these basterds into office, we all lose !!! wake up !!!! snott brown nose sucks and it's his record that shows how much this is true...it will be the air head soccer moms who unconsiously vote for this puke and if they do , them and their children deserve every rotten thing they get !!!
