Category: The Dish

Major Non-Lesbian Bummer

The stories were too good to be true. It turns out that Maureen McCormick, who played Marcia on the Brady Bunch, did not, in fact, have a lesbian affair during the taping of the series with Jan, younger sister. Her memoir will not include the steamy details because they never happened. Apologies to straight post-boomer guys everywhere.

Another NYT Black Eye

And self-inflicted:

Did MoveOn.org get favored treatment from The Times? And was the ad outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse?

The answer to the first question is that MoveOn.org paid what is known in the newspaper industry as a standby rate of $64,575 that it should not have received under Times policies. The group should have paid $142,083. The Times had maintained for a week that the standby rate was appropriate, but a company spokeswoman told me late Thursday afternoon that an advertising sales representative made a mistake.

The answer to the second question is that the ad appears to fly in the face of an internal advertising acceptability manual that says, "We do not accept opinion advertisements that are attacks of a personal nature." Steph Jespersen, the executive who approved the ad, said that, while it was "rough," he regarded it as a comment on a public official’s management of his office and therefore acceptable speech for The Times to print.

That’s the NYT’s own version. Here’s the Daily News. At best, incompetence; at worst, bias. Either way, if the NYT wants to recover, it needs to fire someone. I’m not of the view that this ad was in any way as important as the debate about future strategy in Iraq. But because it distracted us from that, it was a lose-lose proposition. I’m a skeptic of the surge and worried about the use of Petraeus for political purposes. The ad still repelled me.

The extremes on both sides are culpable in this respect. Coulter and MoveOn deserve each other. If you can’t condemn the one, you have no business condemning the other. And the rest of us deserve a lot better.

Hizb ut-Tahrir

If you’re not informed about this organization, you should be. The Weekly Standard has a helpful primer. Money quote:

How worried should the West be about the expansion of this not directly violent group, yet whose alumni include al Qaeda’s notorious Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Musab al Zarqawi? Very worried, argues Maajid Nawaz, a former leader and recruiter for HT in Britain, the organization’s headquarters. As Nawaz explained this month to the New York Times, "Hizb ut-Tahrir spearheaded the radicalization of the 1990s and cultivated an atmosphere of anger. . . . Buried in the literature is an ideology that inevitably leads to violence." Hudson Institute scholar Zeyno Baran put it best: "While HT as an organization does not engage in terrorist activities, it has become the vanguard of the radical Islamist ideology that encourages its followers to commit terrorist acts. . . . HT today serves as a de facto conveyor belt for terrorists."

Here’s a propaganda YouTube made by HT cited in the article. It’s long and full of untruth:

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

You wrote:

Now Dixie is consolidated in one party, with no serious competition within it, with all the cultural and sectarian division that entails.

This is the fourth time or so that I’ve seen something like this from you. I know it’s the CW in Washington, but Jesus, man, do you ever read the news from down here?

I live in North Carolina, former Confederate state, home of the Woolworth’s sit-ins, the Oxford lynching, and plenty of other racial strife. Our House delegation is 7-6, majority Democratic (and may swing further that way in 2008), and we have a Democratic governor, and Democratic control over both chambers of the State House. (Yes we have two Republican Senators, but Dole has become rather unpopular statewide, and Burr is generally regarding as not having done much of anything so for.) North Carolina isn’t anomalous in this regard. Despite the Rovian anti-gay insanity in Virginia, the Democratic party remains healthy there. Arkansas and Louisiana retain their populist leanings which, along with growing numbers of urban voters and the still reliably Democratic black vote, keep the Democrats competitive. Hell, even in Texas, where the color blue was close to being removed from boxes of Crayolas, the Democratic party is showing real life.

Yes, there remains a blue dead zone, and it happens to correspond to what one might call the "Wallace states," or Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi. And yes, the GOP has built its strength upon a southern base. But "no serious competition?" Please.