From the monthly archives: April 2015
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TNR digs up old Al Gore-Ross Perot debate on NAFTA, finds that Trans-Pacific Partnership is being sold exactly?the same way. Also, Perot has been entirely vindicated in his warnings of the dangers of NAFTA and Gore’s smarmy performance is a flashback to a vastly less likable Al Gore.
There’s no particular reason not to remake?Don’t Look Now, but remaking?Escape From New York just seems idiotic to me. The context is critical: in 1979 NYC was in bad shape, so while imagining it as some kind of Australia may have been implausible, the exaggeration made its point, and maybe even satirized the doomsaying about New York a bit by taking it so far over the top.?Not really sure that you can tell the same story or anything close to it in present-day New York, as land values in Manhattan would make federal purchase of the land impractical, and aside from the Subway and poorer neighborhoods, there’s not much grit and grime left there. Moving the story to, say, Camden, N.J., would make much more sense. But in today’s remake-obsessed film industry, things like context and sense don’t matter compared to branding. It’ll probably be better than?Escape From L.A. in any event, though that’s hardly saying much.
For the New York Times to (nonexclusively) hire an anti-Clinton muckraker ranks as one of the stupider moves in recent political/media history. That doesn’t mean it’s not hard to figure out the logic of it. Negative Clinton stories get clicks, and the?Times gets to (in its own mind) dust off the old “impartial” cap. But in the long term, mainstream media organizations continue to delude themselves that (a) there is any series of actions that they can take in order to insulate themselves from conservative bias claims, and (b) that the sort of informed liberals that form the core of their readership will continue to read a paper that allows people with a conservative agenda to spread their wares in its pages?is nonsense. In the short run, it’s probably overall a smart move. In the long run…well, there’s a reason why left-oriented media continue to grow while mainstream sources continue to atrophy.
Read more on While You’re At It, I Hear Joe The Plumber Needs An Op-ed Gig…
Vaccination bill advances in California Senate.
It really is–huge and difficult and contradictory. And generally underserved by mainstream Western reporting and punditry, offered by people who?got most of their knowledge of the place from TV and movies. I’d say this is a pretty good?look?at Russia’s?present state. It doesn’t deny the realities of the currently dominant Slavophilic tendency: harsh nationalism, xenophobia, international swagger. But there is also a longstanding Russian tradition of reform, idealism and modernization–the Europhilic tendency. Both go back centuries in Russian history and, if you know the history, they tend to have a sun- and moon-like alternation, even (especially) when it seems like that’s unthinkable. Gorbachev followed Brezhnev, after all. It’s what makes the culture so interesting, these simultaneous extremes existing at once. So while it’s perfectly valid to criticize Putin and all he’s done, it’s not the whole story, nor a permanent state of affairs.
Lindy West’s column on the symbolism of the potential election of a woman president is worth reading, and characteristically, quite funny. The Wayne LaPierre quote she lampoons is stupid, but not atypical of how the right thinks of these things. It’s taken more or less as a fact that Obama only won because of his race, which mitigated the otherwise-damning Jeremiah Wright/Tony Rezko/Weather Underground stories that would certainly have doomed any other candidate. It’s not hard to find other examples–our good buddy Dennis Prager insists that Obama was only elected because he was “a charismatic black,” which is a verbatim phrase that does all the work so that I don’t have to. And one can think of plenty of others: Newt Gingrich’s dismissal of the 2008 campaign as a therapy session, say.
I actually don’t think Republican candidates are going to do much damage to themselves in calling for cuts to Medicare and Social Security. I think that they’ll get in serious, serious trouble if (more when) they seriously try again to do it, and next time around, the billionaires ain’t waiting for no second term like they did with Dubya. But until that point, FOX News exists and it will?tell the olds that Paul Ryan Chris Christie list of casino gamesJeb Bush is an honorable man, and they’ll listen. Of course, his brother’s presidency crashed when the hubris of a three-point reelection win prompted him to get all over that third rail, and if he wins, so will his. But up until that point, conservative spin will prevent much damage from occurring.
A lot of people seem to think that Ben Carson is this year’s Herman Cain-style business plan candidate, whose only real reason for running was to help further a career in right-wing media. This is true. But proposing huge cuts to Social Security as the basis of a presidential run? It’s almost like Chris Christie isn’t even pretending to run for any reason other than?as an audition to get in on the Pete Peterson gravy train.
Jerry Shepherd: Keep Howard Schultz off the ballot, any ballot.? Can he pass a test on the Constitution??? Does he know anything about...
Metavirus: At least when it came to someone like Ross Perot you got some fun Texas-twanged leprechaun moments out of him.? “Larry,...
lumpkin: Amazing that Schultz doesn’t see what a Quixotic farce his “candidacy” is. The board of directors at...
Lev: Pretty much. Also, these people clearly don’t understand how government works. It’s not like they could just present Trump with a...
