Hold Fast

Shot: I want to speak directly to [showrunners Ed] Burns and [David] Simon: Do another season of The Wire. –Attorney General Eric Holder, speaking at a Justice Department anti-child-abuse forum attended by Wire actors Wendell “Bunk” Pierce, Sonja “Kima” Sohn, and Jim “Prez” True-Frost. The Daily What. Chaser: “The Attorney-General’s kind remarks are noted and [...]

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I really agree with David Dayen and Baratunde Thurston (see above) in their analysis of the President releasing his long form birth certificate yesterday and what it means about the state of affairs in our country. Dayen: And I do think the spectacle of an American President having to debase himself to confront conspiracy theorists [...]

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When it comes to hippy punching, the Washington Post’s in-house “liberal,” Dana Milbank, is one of the Beltway press corps’ most accomplished pugilists. His career can be easily defined by his use of his platform as a nominal liberal to say how silly and out of touch liberals are. Milbank’s latest involves mocking the Congressional [...]

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With global attention on the protests in Egypt, it’s not shocking that some people have fixated on the role of social networks like Twitter as driving the activities of anti-Mubarak protesters. Indeed, one of the first major steps Mubarak took to try to stymie the dissidents was completely shutting off the internet in Egypt (it [...]

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Matt Bai has always held a special hatred for the online left, from bloggers to the politicians who appeal to voters through blogs. As such, it’s not shocking that he writes a misleading and factually inaccurate column like the one today titled, “For Obama, Getting Message Out Online Is a Challenge.” No, it’s not. Obama [...]

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Not that this is an area I ever write about, but Matt Taibbi has a great passage in a piece beating up Matt Bai in which he assails the culture many young, ostensibly liberal, journalists adhere to in a well-charted path to Beltway acceptance and success. Bai is one of those guys — there are [...]

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Matt Bai has a piece in the New York Times today, titled “‘Blame the Blue Dogs’ Theory for Democratic Losses Doesn’t Add Up.” It’s just plain nuts. Actually, it’s worse than that. Bai primarily seems to be laundering the Conventional Wisdom that Blue Dogs and the Third Way want to take hold – namely, don’t [...]

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Why is Alessandra Stanley still allowed to write about politics? Lines like this make me want to pull my hair out: Mr. Stewart made other jokes on Wednesday, but it was actually more disconcerting to watch Mr. Stewart apply the standard liberal critique to Mr. Obama than it was to see the president of the [...]

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I think Steve Benen’s take on the move by Peter Goodman from the NY Times to the Huffington Post is an interesting one. I don’t know why the standard operating procedure for the mainstream press has become one where reporters can repeat what two sides are saying in a controversy, but not say which one [...]

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Rick Perlstein has a post up on the New York Times’ Room for Debate blog in a discussion, framed by the Times, of how the internet has played a role to rising extremism, as seen with the Koran burning pastor in Florida. Naturally Perlstein flips this flawed premise on its head from the start. The [...]

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