This Ben Smith post about Obama’s media criticisms at Cronkite’s funeral is just flat-out bizarre: But aside from the fact that he’s clearly been reading POLITICO, home of the (OK, slightly self-caricaturing) “Who won the day” feature, I always find this line of criticism somewhat odd. Obama won the Democratic primary in no small part …
Media
The War on Sunstein
The excuse for the hold on Sunstein is just priceless: Nine months later, Sunstein is still not working at the regulatory office. In May, he went through confirmation hearings before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. In June, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) placed a hold on his nomination, citing concerns about Sunstein’s …
Obesity
I’ll admit it, I’ve been reading the Atlantic blogs the past few days. What’s the deal with this never-ending discussion of obesity among McArdle, Ambinder, David Frum, and some of Sully’s readers? I don’t have the energy to sort through it, so could somebody describe it in 30 words or less?
Country first
Marc Ambinder has a pretty sharp piece about the problem with media outlets giving Lady Starburst too much play: Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice presidential candidate, has every right to submit an opinion piece on health care to the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page, and they’ve got every right to print it. But Palin’s …
A shameful episode indeed
I generally consider E. J. Dionne to be a gutless, Vichy liberal, but this is right on the money: We have just gone through one of the most shameful episodes of the young Obama presidency — shameful because of the behavior of the right wing, shameful because the media played into an extremist agenda, shameful …
In Whine, Truth
Not sure how many of you caught Chuck Grassley being “interviewed” by John Roberts this morning, but it was yet another journalistic failure: ROBERTS: Senator, of course, the president has got this speech to a joint session of Congress tomorrow evening. He kind of laid down the groundwork for that, yesterday’s speech to the AFL-CIO …
Heaven knows I’m miserable now
After following JK’s link to Ed Morrisey’s silliness about Obama’s speech: I’ve run the speech through a word frequency counter and found the following results: * 56 iterations of “I” * 19 iterations of “school” * 10 iterations of “education” * 8 iterations of “responsibility” * 7 iterations of “country” * 5 iterations each of …