By Dan Kennedy • Tracking the future of local news and other passions since 2005
When a member of the Governor’s Council wants your endorsement enough to fake it, then your reputation is definitely on the upswing.
Jeremy Jacobs reports at PolitickerMA that Kelly Timilty has sent out campaign literature featuring a fictitious endorsement by Gov. Deval Patrick, complete with his forged signature.
Congratulations, Governor. You’ve truly arrived.
Longtime John McCain admirer Richard Cohen has written a stunning column in the Washington Post about his disillusionment with the erstwhile conductor of the Straight Talk Express. (Via Talking Points Memo.) After excoriating McCain for his profligate lying, Cohen says:
I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty. Those doing the accusing usually attributed my feelings to McCain being accessible. This is the journalist-as-puppy school of thought: Give us a treat, and we will leap into a politician’s lap.
Not so. What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story — that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity.
McCain has soiled all that. His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir — the person in whose hands he would leave the country — is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.
This is remarkable stuff. I’m not sure we’ll see a tougher indictment of McCain for the rest of the campaign.
In my latest for the Guardian, I take a look at how Barack Obama can take advantage of the Wall Street meltdown to seize the momentum back from John McCain.
Friend of Media Nation Al Giordano has broken the news that Sarah Palin had a tanning bed installed in the Alaska governor’s mansion shortly after she was sworn in. Giordano and Bill Conroy, writing for NarcoNews.com, report that Palin paid for the bed with her own money.
I don’t care, and Giordano doesn’t seem to care all that much either. I mention this only in the context of the mockery directed at John Edwards’ $400 haircut (and, for that matter, Bill Clinton’s tarmac haircut), John Kerry’s disturbing preference for Swiss cheese, Barack Obama’s failure to scream for ice cream and similar campaign-trail stupidity.
In other words, Sarah Palin must be … an elitist!
I just finished the New York Times’ deeply disturbing overview of Sarah Palin’s record as mayor and governor.
I could go on and on, but I’ll simply quote Josh Marshall, who says that the article shows Palin to be —
a small-minded person who populates her administration with cronies and grade-school friends, fires those who dare to criticize her and uses the power of her office to pursue personal vendettas. In other words, someone in the habit of abusing official power who should not be let within a mile of being president.
That just about sums it up.
Wise words from Troy Warren, circulation manager at the Bowling Green Daily News:
The news has always been free. Advertising has paid for the news. Circulation rates cover the cost of delivering the newspaper, so people have been paying us for delivery, not for the news.
I know there are still people who believe everything in the newspaper business will be all right once they can start charging folks for reading their Web sites. It’s not going to happen, and Warren explains why it shouldn’t.
Looks like the Houston Chronicle is going all-out in its efforts to keep online readers informed about what’s going on in the wake of Ike. But there would appear to be a flaw in the system. Check this out, from an FAQ on the Chronicle’s Web site:
Question: When will the power come back on?
Answer: It could take weeks. CenterPoint Energy reports virtually all its customers — 2.1 million of its 2.26 million — are without power as of 10 a.m. Saturday.
Hmmm … OK, so who in the Houston-Galveston area is able to read the Chronicle’s Web site?
If injecting donuts with an industrial solvent somehow improved their texture, it wouldn’t necessarily follow that adding solvents to donuts should be a matter of individual choice.
There are many reasons to applaud the city of Boston for banning trans fats, and to hope that other regulatory agencies do the same. But what often gets lost in the discussion is that most trans fats are substances unknown to nature.
The proper analogy is not If we let them ban trans fats, the next time they’ll ban cheeseburgers. It’s Why should trans fats be allowed in food when other poisonous industrial substances are not?
Trans fats are created through an industrial process: pumping hydrogen into vegetable oil, a process that produces an artificial fat that doesn’t spoil as quickly as natural fats. Trans fats raise the level of bad cholesterol and lower the good. Scientists say trans fats are more dangerous than any natural fat.
Want more proof? Michael Graham, who traveled to New Hampshire yesterday to deliver tubes of lipstick to Barack Obama, thinks trans fats are just peachy. I rest my case.
Photo (cc) by Duncan Cumming and reproduced here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
The Bush White House, by all appearances, hasn’t made much of an effort to capture or kill Osama bin Laden since that botched encounter at Tora Bora in late 2001.
Now NPR reports that the administration is going all out to get bin Laden before Bush leaves office.
If you listen to the audio version of the story, you’ll come to the inescapable conclusion that the real goal is to roll up bin Laden even earlier than that — say, a couple of weeks before Election Day.
Shameful.
David Filipov discovers that his piece about visiting Ground Zero for the first time touched a chord. He even hears from a woman who talked with his father at Logan Airport the morning of the terrorist attacks.
He writes: “The conversation went just as I had always imagined it: Dad talked her up, told him the story of his life, and bragged about his three sons.”