In Georgetown, Del., the Thursday after Election Day is Return Day. This is a great tradition that goes back to pre-mass media days, when the people of Sussex County would gather to hear the election returns read aloud on The Circle. These days, of course, everyone already knows the results of the election well before the Return Day festivities, but the ceremony is still beloved as a celebration of democracy and the peaceful transition of power that democracy requires. The... Read more
The Mittens have got me thinking. That would be Shirley and John A. Mittens, of Brooksville, Fla.: Shirley Mitten, 64, a volunteer at a pregnancy center and a resident of Brooksville, Fla., … said she does not know if Mr. Obama is a Muslim. "He says he's not, but we have no way of knowing," Ms. Mitten said. Her husband, John A. Mitten, 64 … pointed out that Mr. Obama's father was a Muslim. The middle name Hussein, he said,... Read more
Hmm. I love coffee. I also love shoofly pie. So this could work: Not that any given two things must go well together just because I happen to like both of them. I have no wish to revisit the great Chocolate Covered Bacon fiasco of ’05. But Coffee Shoofly Pie makes sense. Bitter + Almost-Too-Sweet ought to work out to something like Just Right. In any case, please feel free to use this thread to discuss pie. Or coffee. Or... Read more
"If you saw this, you would take action — wouldn't you?" That text, on a direct mail ad by an anti-Obama group, accompanies a photo of a baby carriage sitting on the railroad tracks. This is why I can't take these people seriously. Let's play along, shall we? Let's try, for the sake of argument, to accept the premise of this ad: Abortion is indistinguishable from killing babies and politicians who support abortion rights are the kind of people who... Read more
Do not deprive the alien or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there. Read more
Snopes.com is necessary, but not sufficient. That's one of the things I started out wanting to say. Then I got a bit distracted as that thought was reinforced by the dismaying spectacle of Sarah Palin's unconditional admirers — their admiration only increasing with every Katie Couric interview and every repeated, documented lie — and that initial thought led to others and those led to others, and puzzlement led to exasperation and then to pity and then to resolve and I... Read more
(See part 1: False Witnesses.) “If you want to look thin, you hang out with fat people.” — Thornton Melon Commenters on the previous post about this rumor were right to argue that I overstated the case in saying that there could be no “innocent dupes” involved in its spread. That’s too categorical. But those few who may have been innocently duped by such an unbelievable tale — the very young, the very old, the very insular — weren’t also... Read more
Former 1960s radical Bill Ayers appeared (as himself) in the 2002 documentary The Weather Underground, which was narrated by Lili Taylor. Taylor was in High Fidelity with Tim Robbins who was in The Hudsucker Proxy with Steve Buscemi. And Steve Buscemi was in Tanner on Tanner with, yes, Barack Obama. That’s only four degrees of separation — a closer connection than either The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times was able to establish in their exhaustive attempts to... Read more
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