The endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama by 2004 Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry was met by a bipartisan negative reaction in the blogosphere, with many writing that it was meaningless and some claiming it would actually taint Obama. They have missed the point.  Some endorsements matter beyond the momentary flicker they create on television screens and computer monitors. Kerry is putting an e-mail list with millions of addresses at Obama’s disposal

Edmund Hillary, who climbed to international fame as the first person to conquer Everest, the world’s highest mountain, died Friday aged 88.  The plain-speaking former New Zealand beekeeper became a household name after he and Nepalese guide Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Everest on May 29, 1953, standing atop a peak that had defied mountaineers for decades. “Well, we knocked the bastard off,” he said on the way back

New Bond Girl, Ukrainian Bombshell Olga Kurylenko: Light my samovar, baby. 

Our own SarahW is mentioned in a WaPo story about the cyber “lynching” (a strange choice of terminology) of Lori Drew for her role in Megan Meier’s suicide:  a poignant potboiler version of the story that is nevertheless accurate. What’s hilarious, though, is the author’s representation of cyberspace as a place where falsehood reigns supreme–as opposed to the mainstream media–and where poor judgments have terrible consequences for real people.  Not that naming

The top story at Memeorandum at the moment is a comment by NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo — a prominent Clinton supporter– on the NH primary (and possibly the IA caucus): “It’s not a TV crazed race. Frankly you can’t buy your way into it,” Cuomo said. “You can’t shuck and jive at a press conference,” he added. “All those moves you can make with the press don’t work when you’re in

In this election, as the New York Times informs the unwashed: If the race wasn’t about gender already, it certainly is now. And if it is not now, the New York Times is working hard to make it so with pieces like “Women’s Support for Clinton Rises in Wake of Perceived Sexism.” This piece does not cite any polling data to support its thesis, relying instead on anecdotal data from

Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, has penned an ignorant op-ed for today’s New York Times about the ostensibly bad polling of the NH Democratic primary.  After considering a number of factors that may have affected the poll results, Kohut turns to racism by lower-class whites as an explanation: To my mind all these factors deserve further study. But another possible explanation cannot be ignored — the longstanding

Having over-reported stories based on polling — and having been embarrassed by the polling in both Iowa and New Hampshire — the media may be waking up to the importance of the “ground game” of presidential politics… for a day, anyway. The first example is the New York Times story on the race in Nevada, the next stop on the Democratic campaign trail (this caucus is non-binding for the GOP, so only Mitt Romney and

A recent Los Angeles Times editorial claimed that one-fifth of Americans live on $7 a day — barely enough for a trip to Starbucks. Annie Jacobsen searches for the truth behind this dubious statistic and finds a tangle of shoddy analysis along the way. I mean, how can one go to Starbucks after reading this?  In the LA Times?  At Starbucks?

excepting, maybe, some flicks with Alec Baldwin in them, is Chatterbox.  I bring it up because of yesterday’s talk about this, and because people tend to forget these things in all the hype about the cutting edge, groundbreaking, taboo smashing blahblahblah that always accompanies such “outlandish” “events”. In point of fact, Aeschylus seems to have dramatized the vagina dentata in his lost play, The Phallophagos, which appears to have gotten