Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 57

Ground zero "mosque" Beirut style

A friend passed this along, from a US blog I'd never heard of but which seems quite interesting.

This blogger, Ghassan "Gus" Bridi, apparently an Arab American and a lawyer who describes himself as leaning left on some matters and right on others, was thinking about Newt Gingrich's comments on the lower Manhattan mosque fracas. And he was thinking about Lebanon, and its rebuilding after the 2006 war. By the way I just happened across a very fine French film about the 2006 Israeli bombings...

Musical censorship like the old days | Michael Tomasky

So I was in a store yesterday afternoon, and "Late in the Evening" came on the sound system. That's a nice song, I thought. Haven't heard it in ages.

So I'm enjoying myself, and he gets to the third verse: I learned to play some lead guitar/and I'uz underage in this funky bar/and I...

And I what? The next line, of course, is "stepped outside to smoke myself a J." And I was lightly singing along, and I started singing those words, but lo and behold, they were cut. It skipped to: and I turned...

The Democratic campaign begins | Michael Tomasky

Barack Obama used Labor Day weekend to start to roll out the notions the Democrats are going to try to run on - the same weekend that more polls came predicting a Republican wipe out.

This past weekend marks the traditional start of the US fall campaign season. So if you're a traditionalist, it stands to reason that that's when Obama would start campaigning in earnest. But tradition has its limits. The problem is that the Republicans never stop campaigning. The Democrats, 16 years - that's...

The Franzen feud | Michael Tomasky

I trust you've been following to some extent the Jonathan Franzen-New York Times-chick lit debate. If not, it is summed up well here, in this Slate piece in which the authors counted up every piece of adult fiction reviewed in the NYT over the last two years and found that men get reviewed about twice as often as women.

Of course the book-reviewing trade discriminates against women. Why should it be any different from anything else? I say that derisively, you understand, not with approval.

I...

The jobs numbers and new, uh, absolutely not stimulus | Michael Tomasky

The White House's latest play: too late substantively, maybe just barely not too late politically

To utterly no one's surprise, the August jobs report is bleak. Just more than 50,000 jobs were lost overall, but that was mostly because of the foreseen end of temporary employment by the Census Bureau. Private companies added 67,000. June and July figures were also revised up, but it's all not nearly enough to drive the unemployment rate down.

It went up by 0.1%, to 9.6%, an increase that is...

Friday quiz: literary quotes | Michael Tomasky

I was thinking that we haven't done much literature in these quizzes. There's a reason for that, which is, compared to a lot of people I know, I haven't read a lot of things. I have some deeply embarrassing gaping holes. I've never read Jane Austen. Can you imagine? How could this be? I spent more time when I was a younger man reading history, political philosophy, political science and current events. Within history, I've read lots of intellectual and cultural history, so I know about...

More on the UN | Michael Tomasky

Stupid me, I should have remember to go to undispatch.com and check their archives on this. As usual, the intrepid Mark Leon Goldberg has been on the story of the Human Rights Council and the universal periodic reviews.

In the comment thread to my earlier post on this matter of the State Department and the Arizona immigration law and the UN, I wrote, in response to left halfback, who thought that the US shouldn't be reporting to the UN period end of story:

LHB: The point of participating in...

State, Arizona and the UN | Michael Tomasky

Our dear Appalachian-Lukacsian-Burnettian comrade (did I forget anything?) known by the initials VM certainly piqued my interest this morning with that business in the comment thread about the State Department and Arizona and the UN. So I looked into it, and yes it's true, but...

The UN used to have a high commission on human rights. That's the one Libya chaired. Thus discredited, the high commission was replaced by a new body called the UN Human Rights Council in 2006. Under its rules...

Liberals and despair, again | Michael Tomasky

As you'll recall I've written previously about liberals and despair, earlier in the summer. But I've been thinking about this anew lately, because, well, the situation has if anything gotten worse.

Most liberal despair is expressed toward Obama. He hasn't done this, he messed up on that. Since people on the left are by nature anti-authority and more likely than people on the right are to turn on people they admire once those people have power, this is understandable.

But I think the more...

The hostage taker (and my commute) | Michael Tomasky

When you're on a bad run, you're on a bad run. One might have thought that a nut who has taken a hostage at the headquarters of the Discovery network in Silver Spring, Maryland might be from the right, because Discovery devotes lots of admirable programming to saving the environment and the whales and on and on. But no, he's a left-wing nut.

This is happening about a mile from my house, folks. The whole area has been evacuated. Could make getting home a bit tricky.

All right, I shouldn't make ...