Scott McClellan was the first White House press secretary that once-and-future BTC News White House writer Eric Brewer had the opportunity to question. McClellan’s response was so memorably robotic that Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin devoted the top of his column to it the next day. New York University journalism prof and press critic Jay […]

When Hillary Clinton used the example of Bobby Kennedy’s June 1968 assassination to argue that withdrawing from the Democratic presidential primary contest would be stupid because other primaries have extended to June and beyond, some prominent Obama supporters (and many less so) translated her comments as “Obama could get killed, and I could win” rather […]

The New York Times has a he said/she said story about the potential hazards of second-generation biofuel crops, which generally aren’t edible and hence don’t contribute to famine and associated political difficulties, but are often unfriendly to local ecosystems and domestic crops. On one side of the story are ecologists and others who point to […]

Lots of names are getting dropped as potential running mates for the by no means coronated Barack Obama. Governors Janet Napolitano, Bill Richardson, Kathleen Sebelius and Ed Rendell of Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas and Pennsylvania, respectively, are oft mentioned; so are Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, retired general Wes Clark, and, lord help us, diplomatically […]

The Forward, a premier Jewish periodical, boasts an Onion-like opinion piece in its current issue from Yehezkel Dror, a political scientist of some renown (and clout) in Israel. Dror says Israelis, and Jews in general, shouldn’t hesitate to shed moral compunction about pretty much anything in their quest to keep Israel extant. In this he […]

Writing in the London Review of Books, Donald MacKenzie describes a form of gambling masquerading as a sophisticated financial transaction that he describes as the “End of the World trade”, in which an insurer bets that “around a third of the leading investment-grade corporations in Europe or half those in North America” won’t go bankrupt, […]

The National Review was founded by Bill Buckley, a very smart man who reached for the loftiest sources to back up his often hideous but invariably elequently stated views. He’s dead now but he outlived the reputation of his magazine by some years and he’ll be walking the earth again before the magazine regains its […]

Barack Obama is the clear choice of homeless people, at least those in the Venice and Santa Monica, CA, environs, for president. Despite polling that shows Hillary Clinton doing generally better among the backbone Democratic constituencies—blue collar workers and the poor, to the extent those are distinct groups these days—almost no one in the parks […]

Slake’s Limbo, by Felice Holman
Mr Pye, by Mervyn Peake
The Gospel According to the Simpsons, by Mark I. Pinsky
This month takes us on three spiritual quests, ranging from an unsubtle thematic exploration on the rocks and under the tracks, to a sort of allegorical cocktail, to–screw it–non-fiction straight from the bottle. Slake’s Limbo, although it’s […]

Circumstances in Iraq are insanely complicated, but not generally indecipherable. The major players are known—some well, some not so well—many major occurrences are reported, and a fair number of people who are either in Iraq or know the country well regularly provide commentary and analysis. Yet the US press continue to rely largely on the […]