Month: October 2007

After one semester of study.

Our editor has urged us to debate one another. And so it comes to pass:

The trouble, of course, is that Jeffrey Goldberg has no particular interest in the political enfranchisement of American Jews as such. He’s not talking about empowering Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein and Eric Alterman and Harold Meyerson and Josh Marshall and MJ Rosenberg and Daniel Levy. He’s talking about empowering Jeffrey Goldberg and Alan Dershowitz and Martin Peretz and Charles Krauthammer. Which is fine. Obviously, you’d expect Goldberg to want to see people who agree with him empowered vis-à-vis those who disagree with him, but this has nothing to do with empowering "the Jews" and everything to do with empowering some Jews whose ideas have not, over the years, served the United States or Israel very well.

Josh Marshall is Jewish?

Here is Jeffrey’s review of Walt and Mearsheimer. I’m traveling in Missouri and haven’t had time to read it. Will do soon. Everything Jeffrey writes is worth reading.

Nipple "at least 45 percent from the top." I guess only a science researcher would come up with that one.

A whole blog devoted to "unnecessary" "quotation marks". And another one for persnickety nit-pickers. And I know you read this "blog". (Hat tip: 3QD).

They have been allegedly rounded up, disrobed and in shackles at a disused race course and a technical college. God knows what will be done to them. One can only hope that Christians will lead the campaign against this vicious attack on non-violent religious freedom.

This is surely becoming an atrocity that renders every regime that deals with Burma and supports this barbarism outside the boundaries of the civilized world. Threatening a boycott of the Beijing Olympics does not seem to me unreasonable, unless the Chinese really do tell the junta to stop the killing.

Science finds some strange resemblances between graduate students and a certain kind of unsavory insect.

Is it a big deal? You’d think so with stories in the NYT and Salon and a potential crippling division in the GOP next year. Giuliani has tried pushing back. How serious is it? NRO, Hewitt and Reynolds have all studiously avoided comment. I guess it’s serious.

Worse than we knew:

The fact is that people inside the Giuliani campaign are appalled at the number of times their candidate has felt compelled to interrupt public appearances to take calls from his wife. The estimate from those in a position to know is that he has taken such calls more than 40 times in the middle of speeches, conferences and presentations to large donors. "If it’s a stunt, it’s not one coming from him," says one Giuliani staffer. "It’s an ongoing problem that he won’t take advice on."

That’s just what we need, isn’t it? Another president with ongoing problems he won’t take advice on. As Mark Shea notes:

Boy, I sure am glad that a sane normal person like Giuliani is representing the Mainstream of the GOP and not a contemptible nut like Ron Paul.

Ahem.

"I believe President Bush is going to order airstrikes [on Iran] before he leaves office," – Norman Podhoretz, on CSPAN yesterday. NPod made an error in his Commentary article, pointed out by one of the many readers of that neoconservative journal who were taken aback by his proposal to bomb Iran:

As an example of Britain’s tepid response to Iran’s taking captive several of its sailors back in March, Norman Podhoretz quotes the public reaction of Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt to a photograph of one of the prisoners with a cigarette in his mouth: “This [smoking] sends completely the wrong message to our young people.” But this little anecdote cannot be used as evidence of Western weakness in the face of Iranian aggression. The quotation was fabricated as part of an April Fools’ joke in the London Guardian.

NPod’s response:

If the remark I attributed to Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt was fabricated as an April Fools’ joke by the London Guardian, surely that would have been obvious to the other British papers that quoted it. Still, if Mr. Ford is right, which I doubt, I for one would welcome it as a sign that while the British may be down, they’re not so flat as all that.

It took me five minutes to find the following on Google:

On April 1 this column alleged that Patricia Hewitt had said, of a TV appearance by Leading Seaman Faye Turney, that ‘it was deplorable that the woman hostage should be shown smoking. This sends completely the wrong message to our young people.’

This was quoted by other newspapers and even mentioned on Have I Got News For You. I am happy to offer Miss Hewitt my apologies for setting this fictitious hare running but suggest that she looks again at the date.

There are two options: NPod cannot use the Internet or NPod cannot concede an error. They are not mutually exclusive.