Agora 19 Jul 2008 10:42 pm
Many folks were bothered by the recent New Yorker cover depicting Barack and Michelle Obama in the Oval Office. Presumably he had been elected president (!), but he’s wearing Muslim garb (?). And his wife looks a lot like Angela Davis, replete with an AK-47 (??). Oh, and there’s a portrait of Osama bin Laden [...]
Agora and Russia 4 Jun 2008 8:17 pm
Russians may be great chess players, but they don’t seem to get the hang of American politics. Commenting on press reports that Hillary Clinton is open to the idea of being Barack Obama’s running mate, a reporter for Moskovskii Komsomolets writes:
Experts predict … if Obama invites Clinton to join his team as vice president, supporters [...]
Agora 27 May 2008 7:48 pm
Seen on the rump of a car last week:
O’BAMA 2008
♣ Vote Irish ♣
And today: Jeff Greenfield on the American preference for presidents with unchallenging (i.e., bland, preferably mono- or bisyllabic Anglo-Saxon) last names. Could a George W. Dukakis ever have been elected? George W. Kucinich (or Voinovich)? George W. Deukmejian? A “nation of [...]
Random 21 May 2008 3:08 pm
The lefty blogs have gone so batscheiss crazy over the fact that Clinton is still in the race, it’s impossible to read them. So, for some weeks now, I haven’t. It’s very pleasant.
I finally got around to reading a novel a friend gave me a while back, Beyond Sleep, by the Dutch writer Willem Frederik [...]
Agora 29 Apr 2008 10:31 pm
The devoted reader of this blog will remember that its proprietor voted for Hillary Clinton in the DC primary. What the reader could not know (unless you know me personally) is that I declared Hillary Clinton toast soon after Super Tuesday in a private family discussion board where I dump the bulk of my political [...]
Agora 23 Mar 2008 11:39 am
The other day my friend Thomas (aka The Newsrack Blogger) got into a fistfight at a local bookstore over the question of impeachment.
Okay, it wasn’t a fistfight—he had shouting match with Eric Alterman, author of Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America, during the Q&A at a book signing.
Okay, okay, the exchange wasn’t [...]
Agora 29 Feb 2008 7:35 pm
The recent news coverage of Barack Obama’s supposed “plagiarism” stirred up once again the confused pot of ideas I have or seem to have about originality and the overselling of same in the form of “intellectual property rights.”
Due to the unprecedented way my cortical convolutions took shape in the latter stages of my embryonic life, [...]
Agora 12 Feb 2008 7:17 pm
I voted for Hillary Clinton today in the DC Democratic primary.
Why? Let me put it this way. The Homer Simpsons and Montgomery Burnses and Mayor Quimbys and Kent Brockmans have been in charge forever and have managed to make a pretty good mess of things. It’s long past time for Lisa Simpson to have a [...]
Agora 5 Nov 2007 9:08 pm
Larry Derfner, a columnist for the Jerusalem Post, asks a rhetorical question you won’t find anywhere in the US media:
How long are Israel and its lobby in Washington going to go on living this ridiculous, transparent lie? How long are they going to hock the world about the Holocaust while acting as Turkey’s number two [...]
Russia 31 Oct 2007 12:48 pm
Старые привычки … I don’t know if there’s a Russian equivalent for the English phrase: “Old habits die hard.” It would certainly apply to recent events in the Russian hinterland, where workers were ordered to attend pro-Putin rallies in a number of cities.
The Guardian reports:
A telegram from Sergey Lemikhov, a railways boss in western Siberia, [...]
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