There are those who have been egging me on to write about Ruth Marcus’s and Michael Gerson’s awful anti-health care reform pieces today in Kaplan. Not gonna do it, it wouldn’t be prudent at this juncture. Instead, I’m going to link to the Washington City paper’s report that Kaplan may try to continue on without the services of Sally Quinn:
A newsroom source at the Washington Post has just confirmed that the very survival of Sally Quinn’s dreadful column, “The Party,” has been the topic of several high-level discussions at the paper this week. The talks follow a column penned by Quinn last Friday, in which she laid out all the reasons for a wedding-scheduling snafu in her family. The column was a response to some negative stories written about how the date of the wedding of Quinn’s son,
Bradlee QuinnQuinn Bradlee, coincided with that of Quinn’s husband’s granddaughter. A decision on the fate of the column has reportedly escalated all the way to Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli. We’re headed there now.
Comrade Mary
#pre-emptively jumps for joy#
Persia
@Comrade Mary: They’ll probably just hire her over on Politico.
Silver
I wonder if Sally will get back from the whorehouse in time to attend the meeting?
DougJ
@Comrade Mary:
Clever.
licensed to kill time
Come on within
You’ll not see nothing like the Mighty Quinn!
(Your titles are just………………….awesome :)
beltane
When Quinn the Eskimo gets here, everybody’s gonna want to dose. I think they do a lot of that over at the Washington Post.
slag
Sally Quinn’s son is named Quinn Bradley? How do you look yourself in the mirror after you do that to someone?
asiangrrlMN
Wait a minute. They are updating whether or not this shitty column is going to continue? How delightfully trivial. Oh, and, good riddance to Quinn and the spawn of Quinn/Bradlee. I read the link someone here excerpted written by Quinn Bradlee on what happened when he told Mommy Dearest that he had given it up to a hooker, and I was cringing as I read every sentence. This family needs therapy–not a national column in which they can dump their dysfunctions.
Comrade Mary
@DougJ: Old Dylan freak. It’s wired into me now.
r€nato
They’re not going to can her. It’s rather… impolite and Sally comes from good people, you know.
I think they are figuring out a polite and plausible way to hide her somewhere.
DougJ
@Comrade Mary:
Did Bob Dylan write that one?
They played “If Not For You” at Starbucks today — it really stands out against the usual Norah Jones and Bright Eyes.
freelancer (itouch)
@asiangrrlMN:
Oh yes. That kid is literally a sad son of a bitch.
Mike Kay
I still can’t get over the fact that Sally named her son after herself.
asiangrrlMN
@freelancer (itouch): Nice one. And, so fucking true.
@Mike Kay: Supposedly, it’s a Southern thing when two prominent families commingle bloodlines (as someone on this very blog explained).
jenniebee
I suppose in the internet age one can’t complain about the column space devoted to an unsourced play-by-play of the horse race that decides the survival of a society column that existed for no other reason in the first place than to give a job to the widow of the paper’s editor.
All the same, I see pixels dying.
El Cid
I note that the major news media exclusively use the “$1 trillion” scare figure for the size of the health care package without including the CBO-estimated figures of simultaneous savings, program non-duplication, and increased revenues, even going by the CBO’s cost estimate of the Senate bill only (which cost more than the House bill), of $619 billion net cost in the first 10 years and a net plus over the next 10 years.
demo woman
Now we know what it takes to have the Washington Post censor you. Maybe Thiessen will insult the editor.
dmsilev
The word ‘schadenfreude’ really was designed for exactly these moments.
-dms
R-Jud
@DougJ:
He did. He does a great live version of it on a compilation album somewhere.
Rock
What’s awful about the Marcus piece? It lays out why HCR is dead in the House is pretty clear terms. Are you disputing the math? Marcus is obnoxious, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t right.
I’m all for ignoring the Gerson piece.
MikeJ
Sally ain’t my cup of meat.
rob!
Sally Quinn just ain’t my cup of meat.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
It’s about time somebody at the WaPo got their act together. Those deck chairs aren’t going to re-arrange themselves, you know.
[glub, glub]
Bort
I think that The Column is going to be watershed moment in watershed moments. You know who invented the column? The Romans. Or was that the arch…
asiangrrlMN
@El Cid: Stop throwing facts into the mix! You’ll just get the Villagers all confused. And, do you have cats?
@Bort: Snert. I think they invented both! And, since Sally Quinn is arch, that makes her the Holy Roman Empress. Or something.
slag
@asiangrrlMN: Curse you. I had to look this up: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist/2009/04/02/quinn-bradlee-loses-virginity-to-prostitute-doesnt-understand-women/.
Everything I know about these two is more than I ever needed to know.
Mojotron
#pre-emptively jumps for joy#
I wouldn’t leave the ground yet; the way the Post has been going, odds are she’ll be replaced by someone like Veronique de Rugy or someone equally as terrible.
Mary Travers' Ghost
You ain’t got nothin on the mighty Quinn.
Ash Can
Holy fucking crap. The WaPo has some professional standards left. Who’da thunk?
asiangrrlMN
@slag: Oooh, sorry. I should have known that mentioning it would make someone with an insatiable curiosity (much like I am) look it up. My apologies! I hope you don’t have nightmares tonight.
Linda Featheringill
I actually went to WaPo and read the two offending pieces. More articles on why Obama is dead in the water because of blah, blah, blah. In their dreams.
What will happen to HCR? Dunno. Crystal ball broke. However – it is not over until it is over. We just might come out of this mire with something useful.
More to the point, why are we still reading Gerson?
Elizabelle
Roll Roll Roll Roll Roll
— Katherine Graham
Nellcote
@Mojotron:
or the “liberal”/PUMA Lady Lynn Rothchild. Unless, HuffPoo has an exclusive.
dmsilev
You realize that this establishes something very important. It is possible to write a Post column so bad that you get at least considered for being fired. Up until now, that was an open philosophical question, right alongside “can God create a stone too heavy for Him to lift?”.
-dms
slag
@asiangrrlMN: S’alright. I’m already listening to some Bob Dylan to cleanse myself of dark thoughts. It’s the Tao of Balloon Juice.
El Cid
@asiangrrlMN: I have 1 cat. Though she may weigh 2 average cats.
MTiffany
I’m sorry, I don’t get the joke. What’s the punchline again?
Tonybrown74
@slag:
Is it possible to laugh and cry at the same time? If so, then I don’t have to worry about my reaction to that article …
Comrade Mary
Dylan’s Twitter feed is useful but bland and corporate and obviously not written by him. I was hoping for something like Shit My Dad Says.
What’s surprisingly good: the first volume of his memoirs. If you can read Italian, you can read much of it here.
Bulworth
How did the Wash Post get to be called Kaplan Test Prep? I didn’t get the memo or wasn’t at the meeting when this was discussed. I like it. It sounds funny. I’m just not in the loop as to how this terminology developed. Thanks
asiangrrlMN
@El Cid: Cool. I thought you had at least one animal. It’s a requirement now that you are an FH of mine.
@slag: Bob Dylan cleanses you of dark thoughts? He inspires them in me. Hmmmm….
licensed to kill time
@Bulworth: The Balloon Juice Lexicon is your friend. Check under K for Kaplan Daily.
Mojotron
Nellcote: Heh, that’s actually who I was thinking of, I got them mixed up.
What’s the difference between them again?
slag
@Tonybrown74:
This is possibly the only sane reaction to just about any story the media Heathers condescend to grace us with.
Bulworth
@licensed to kill time: Thank you. I believe I am now aware of all Internets traditions.
El Cid
@asiangrrlMN: Warning, though — she doesn’t play well with others. Wonderful with me. Rather angry and fearful with about anyone and everything else.
Joshua Norton
She can get back in their good graces by knocking out a few thousand words about how cool waterboarding is.
Citizen Alan
@dmsilev:
Froomkin proved that it’s quite easy to get fired if you profess any moral qualms about torturing brown people for fun and profit. I think if the Post went bankrupt it would possibly be the happiest day of my life. There is no greater hive of moral leprosy in all of the MSM, and I include Fox in that. They’ve been coasting on Watergate for as long as I’ve been alive, even though today Fred Hiatt wouldn’t publish anything damaging to a Republican President if you put a gun to his head.
cat48
No need to write about the other columns since both have A words that give anyone a tip-off: Marcus–Audaciousness (not in a good way) and Gerson–Arrogance (Hear that’s going to be a key word in the 2012 race against BO.) They should be careful though because to a lot of folks it sure sounds a lot like the other word they used at first to describe him “Uppity” which they were pounced on for. Evidently Repugs are the only ones unfamiliar with uppity and the N word that often follows it when white folks use it in reference to blacks.
As for Miss Sally, she’s gotten away with mocking folks in her columns for years. It is ironic she would hurt herself with such a mockable column about ……herself!
jl
I guess there were no editors that had anything to do with it?
Maybe Quinn should have used as a springboard for teengossip style policy analysis, and that would have been OK.
Origuy
What ever happened to the clown who insisted that referring to the WaPo as the Kaplan Daily was not only slurring the memory of the great Stanley Kaplan, but was prima facie an anti-Semitic slur?
And Another Thing...
@Comrade Mary: Oooo..thanks for the link..
“Don’t mess with him…Trust me, you don’t fuck with a man that sleeps next to a woman he never screws. They’re unpredictable.”
TooManyJens
@jenniebee:
The entire comment is classic, but “I see pixels dying” should be a tag.
SiubhanDuinne
@jenniebee:
Love your entire comment. However, Sally’s no widow: Ben Bradlee is still alive (although aging rapidly, I have no doubt).
Tax Analyst
@asiangrrlMN:
You mean like incest?
Tax Analyst
Guess yah can’t say inc*st here. In moderation box for that.
anon
from Lily Garcia’s WaPo discussion
Burke, Va.: I’m so confused!
Our ex-boss’ wife (HIS third wife) still writes for the company newsletter. Last week, she wrote a column about how her son’s wedding is on the same day as her husband’s granddaughter’s wedding, on opposite coasts, and nobody can figure out why we’re supposed to care. I guess everybody likes the old man so much that everybody’s afraid to tell his wife that her column is absurd and makes the company newsletter look stupid.
Any suggestions?
Lily Garcia: It sounds like the column, although inappropriate, is basically harmless. You could try suggesting topics that you would like to see covered in the newsletter, but you should stop short of proposing that the ex-boss’ wife be excluded.