Sometimes it’s obvious:
Well, whenever I travel, one of the first things I do upon checking into my room is to turn on the TV and search the available channels. Stateside, I suffer from withdrawal if TV Land is unavailable. While abroad, I’ll sit through any show if I recognize the theme song, despite the language barrier.
"The Nanny". Now in Spanish. She has the YouTubes.
Clemons wants Giuliani:
The fact that David Frum, Norman Podhoretz, and Daniel Pipes are advisors to Giuliani makes folks like me salivate. Whether the Republican Party knows it or not, a Romney/Hagel ticket or Romney/Huckabee ticket would be much harder for Hillary Clinton to tackle.
Matt’s still a Mitt-man.
That’s the answer to the question of whether you can chew gum and lose weight at the same time. In fact, a new study argues that the two go together.
They’re inversely correlated, according to the latest Pew Report. Notice how the US is an outlier. I loved this nugget:
More than half of Americans say their culture is superior to others, a larger proportion than in most other Western publics. But in Italy, nearly seven-in-ten say their way of life is better.
A Wisconsin Republican sees hope in Louisiana.
If you think it feels like a police state now, just wait till the DHS gets its way.
Apparently, the only people allowed to comment on health care are uninsured diabetics from East New York . . . which makes any discussion moot, because that sure doesn’t describe any of my interlocutors.
There’s a weird presumption that the political must be personal. To be sure, class and income and background affect our thinking in subtle ways. But they don’t make it impossible to develop, or maintain, a principled belief that runs against one’s own immediate self-interest. What’s the Matter with Kansas? might more properly have been titled What’s the Matter with Thomas Frank?
Easy, really:
Fortunately, the book’s absence from my life hasn’t prevented me, as a citizen of the United States of Amazonikipedia, from learning everything there is to know about it. I know, for instance, that Bayard, a respected literature professor, admits in the preface that he doesn’t enjoy reading, has little time for it, and lectures frequently on books he hasn’t read—scandalous revelations that helped make the book a sensation in Europe. I know, from a photo of the book, that it is small and blue. I know, from Bayard’s author photo, that he is fiftyish and improbably slim, and likes to dress entirely in black. In fact, in lieu of reading the actual book, I’ve spent a very long time scrutinizing this picture, which strikes me as a masterpiece of calculated faux-casual self-revelation: Bayard leans against a railing in front of a scenic spray of graffiti—a touch of vérité to anchor all the abstraction—and his eyes simmer like coq au vin, and his forehead bunches with a devastating whisper of wrinkle-cleavage (my God, he is about to _think_!), and he appears to be sucking on something, perhaps the word oeuvre. In short, he looks like a foot soldier in the vast army of impish popular intellectuals France has been training since the days of Roland Barthes, just in case the struggle for freedom should ever come down to the ability to wring paradoxes out of a stone or unriddle the world with Lacanian decoder rings.
Almost ready to be a blogger.
