My Sign-Off From Politics Daily
True to form, I was too busy to go to the meeting and missed my own firing yesterday; don't you hate it when that happens? (All my life, my mom has been saying I'd be late to my own funeral, so could we please not tell her she was right?) There were a few other mix-ups, too, with the result that some AOL employees were invited to the Meeting of Death by accident, while others who were supposed to have been on the layoff list were walking around like Bruce Willis in "The Sixth Sense." Also in error, I mistakenly received some last-minute communications re: the best time to tell an AOL News ...
R.I.P. Janet Battaile: New York Times (and Politics Daily) Editor Had 'a Gift for Humanity'
The last time I saw my friend and longtime editor Janet Battaile, who died just after midnight, more than 10 years after she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, we sucked on the high-end Tootsie Pops someone had brought her and she told about how her wash-out as a waitress led her into the newspaper business. It all started when her father read his pal who was the editor of their hometown paper, the Winchester Evening Star, the funny letter she'd written home about the latest restaurant job she'd been fired from. For heaven's sake, the editor said when he stopped laughing, tell her to come ...
How Nancy Reagan Won Us Over
Everywhere Ron Reagan goes, people ask after his mother Nancy in a way that suggests public opinion about the 89-year-old former first lady has softened considerably in the years since she was dismissed as a trivial, couture-wearing woman, naively taken in by astrologers and unfashionably adoring of her husband, who shopped for china while schoolchildren ate ketchup as a vegetable. These days, as her son says, "she's warmly revered. But I'm not sure she's that aware of it. I tell her and she says, 'Really?' " Really, Mrs. Reagan. And the reappraisal of her in academic circles has if anything ...
Richard Dreyfuss, Crusader for Civility and Labeler of 'Villains'
When I first heard that my 'Goodbye Girl'-era crush Richard Dreyfuss was coming to town to push civility and literacy in civics – hey, just like we are! – I couldn't have been more excited if Colin Firth had challenged me to a game of Scrabble. But then Slate's Dave Weigel had to go and drag out some ancient interview Dreyfuss gave Joy Behar (OK, this was three months ago) explaining that to "play Dick Cheney,'' in the movie "W.," all I had to do was find my Dick Cheney. And you can find all the villainy in the world in your own heart, and that's what an actor's job is. I always ...
Obama's Centrist Tone Hits Right Note; State of the Union Ratings Soar
The bar was lower for Barack Obama's State of the Union address because he only recently gave the speech of his life in Tucson -- and in the aftermath of that tragedy, no one in the chamber was going to so much as whisper, "You fib.'' The proof? Early reviews suggest that his calls for unity, "steady as she goes" affect and soothing, recycled rhetoric suited the moment; an online CBS News Poll of speech watchers found that a whopping 92 percent approved of his proposals, and 81 percent of those who watched said they now approve of the Obama's economic plans, up significantly from 54 percent ...
Kermit Gosnell's Pro-Choice Enablers (Is This What an Industry That Self-Regulates Looks Like?)
The ultimate non-partisan body – a criminal grand jury – has supplied us with the graphic, 261-page horror story of Kermit Gosnell, M.D., who stands accused of butchering seven babies – yes, after they were born alive -- and fatally doping a refugee from Nepal with Demerol in a clinic that smelled of cat urine, where the furniture was stained with blood and the doctor kept a collection of severed baby feet. As often as possible, the report says, Gosnell induced labor for women so pregnant that, as he joked on one occasion, the baby was so big he could "walk me to the bus ...
The Christian Argument Against Obama's and Palin's View of Jared Loughner as 'Evil'
On an awfully crowded patch of common ground, both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin have now suggested that accused Tucson gunman Jared Loughner is evil incarnate. And when those two agree, no, theirs is not a minority view. "It is important for national morale,'' says conservative columnist Michael Barone, "that we foil the purposes of the mad and evil persons who seek to assassinate our public officials." My morale, however, is not lifted by this conflation of the terms "mad" and "evil." On the contrary, I find it depressing that so many smart people choose to see mental illness as a moral ...
'Parker/Spitzer,' E.D. Hill and Our Toxic Rhetoric: Is 'Rudeness Rewarded' CNN's Motto?
This New York Post story about how Kathleen Parker is soon to be dumped from CNN's "Parker/Spitzer" may or may not be right. And it may or may not have come straight from...Eliot Spitzer, even if it does put me in mind me of all those gossip items Donald Trump used to hand-plant in the New York tabs about the various models who were supposedly chasing him. (According to show "insiders," the producers of "Parker/Spitzer" just "love the job Spitzer has been doing," are "standing behind Eliot," and "really like him," too.) But if there's any truth at all to rumors that the network may replace ...
Jay Rosen, Media Critic, Wants to Hear All About ME! (Yay!)
There I was, driving my left-of-center kids to school in the Honda hybrid that only minimally assuages my concern about climate change, when NPR's David Folkenflik came on the radio. "Media critic Jay Rosen,'' he reported, "says mainstream news reporters don't disclose what they believe enough of the time.'' To which I -- a tax-and-spend pro-lifer who questioned our intervention in Iraq from start to finish even as my views on gay marriage evolved -- muttered to my comprehensive-immigration-reform-supporting self that maybe we should say what we believe more of the time, gosh darn it, because ...
Notre Dame's Fr. Jenkins Pins Delays in Lizzy Seeberg Case on 'Discrepancies'
Ahead of the Notre Dame football team's appearance in the Sun Bowl this Friday, the president of the university granted his hometown newspaper quite an interview in defense of the school's handling of the Lizzy Seeberg case. Seeberg is the 19-year-old Saint Mary's College freshman who committed suicide 10 days after accusing a Notre Dame football player of molesting her in his dorm room. At the time of her death, the campus police to whom she reported the incident still had not interviewed the player. In an interview with the South Bend Tribune, the Rev. John Jenkins attributed the ...
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