Category Archives: News

Don’t Go Back to Dulles

Baseball in WashingtonIt appears virtually certain that the Montreal Expos, who have been waiting to find out where their new home will be for a brief eternity, will end up somewhere in rough proximity to Washington, D.C., at least according to recent reports. That they were headed to that part of the country was not news to me, but I was surprised to hear that it’s going to come down to competing proposals, one from the city proper — hoping to replace their long lost Washington Senators — and one from the more affluent suburbs further west and south, in Loudoun County.

I resist posting entries here about baseball, mostly because I feel under-qualified when trying to make the same kind of snotty, dismissive pronouncements about the sport that I am able to make about other subjects about which I know slightly more. But I don’t mind coming right out and saying that I’d rather not see baseball come to the Washington Metropolitan area at all than see the Expos move to Loudoun County.

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Obama Said Knock You Out

Barack ObamaIt’s the end of a very long, long day at the office, and I haven’t even been home yet to catch John Edwards’ speech at the convention yet, but I’m sure it was just fine and not a little bit ‘sunny.’ Before I head home to bed though, I had to get up some belated thoughts about the keynote speech Barack Obama gave last night. I had read so much about the guy beforehand that I was intensely curious and not a little skeptical, but he really did live up to all that advance billing. What an amazing speech he gave; it really did feel like watching something very, very important unfolding. Of course, half of the appeal is that this man has a very short voting record, but the immense potential he displayed last night was staggering. I still feel a little in awe, over twenty-four hours later.

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The Donkey Show

Al GoreFour years off have been kind to both Bill Clinton and Al Gore, if their opening night appearances at the Democratic National Convention were any indication. Clinton, who has lost weight and whose hair now is a full shock of distinguished white, looked like nothing else than a bona fide rock star when he strolled on stage. He gave a speech that should put everyone running for office this year — with the possible exception of John Edwards — to complete shame; it was elegant, forceful and crowd-pleasing, and irrefutable proof that the man does in fact possess the kind of political talent that comes along only once a generation (for better or worse).

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Face the Press

Someone over at the Gray Lady just discovered typography, if David Dunlap’s piece on the 9/11 memorial cornerstone is any indication. Unexpectedly, the article devotes 1,000 words to discussing the use of Gotham — a beautiful typeface designed by Tobias Frere-Jones and distributed by The Hoefler Type Foundry — as the principle face for the cornerstone. The photo caption is unintentionally hilarious: “Gotham… is distinguished by the uniformity in the width of its strokes and the absence of embellishments like serifs.” Really!

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Two’s Company

Kerry EdwardsIt made no sense to me at all that Representative Dick Gephardt’s name continually appeared in the scuttlebutt leading up to John Kerry’s selection of a vice presidential running mate, but apparently he was a mainstay on the short list right up until the last moment. Gephardt’s old school, protectionist rhetoric always struck me as a sure way to write a ticket to another damaging Democratic loss in November, so you can imagine the complete relief that I experienced upon hearing yesterday that Senator John Edwards got the official nod. Once in a while, to see something happen in politics with which you whole-heartedly agree, and to find that most pundits agree with you too — in my view, Edwards’s charisma and highly-regarded elocution are huge pluses on a ticket headed by an ashen-faced father figure, and against opponents marked by dim cronyism and pure, unmitigated mendacity.

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Outraged by the Outrage at All the Outrage

One of the most frustrating tricks that conservative politicians manage to actually get away with is the inversion of indignation, i.e., taking an offensive position on issues where clearly, all good sense would indicate that they should be defensive. In the awful bellyflop that was President Bush’s most recent press conference, I remember Bush answering a question about the paltry international support that the United States could point to in our ongoing operations in Iraq, and how when one took a close look at the numbers, it becomes apparent that, after U.S. and British troops, the single largest demographic of allied troops on the ground is “ private contractors — literally, hired guns.”

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The Gift of Gab

President Bush’s News ConferenceAmongst all the obfuscation, double-talk, evasions, stuttering, awkward pauses, rote repetitions of talking points and tongue-tied sputtering in President Bush’s news conference this evening — only his third ever prime time conference, by the way — I think my absolute favorite line came during an answer to a reporter’s question about… I don’t even remember what it was about. But Bush went down some long, confusing tunnel of rhetoric and, in seeking to illustrate his assertion that America, apparently, has been charged by God with spreading freedom all over the world, he uttered this lovely gem: “I think the American people will find it interesting that we’re providing food for the North Korea people who starve.” I don’t even know what that means.

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Morning Routines

Here’s how my Web surfing habits have changed: somewhere along the way, I got completely out of the habit of reading the various design Web sites like K10k and Surfstation every morning, possibly because I so often find that their purposely terse and cryptic language leaves me wanting. This is also because I’ve been spending more and more time every morning reading political news, most prominently at ABC News’ excellent The Note, which has just started a new spin-off column that intends to offer the same brand of Beltway insiderism on a ‘real time’ basis. And then there’s the Progress Report from the Center for American Progress, which is exhaustive in compiling cogent cases against the Bush adminstration’s errant policies every morning. And of course there’s all those political blogs, too: Talking Points Memo, Political Animal, Instapundit and Wonkette, and wherever they lead me.

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What He Said

Richard A. ClarkeThese are the articles that I read this morning about former White House counter-terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke’s claims in his new book that President Bush had a fixation on invading Iraq and that he pressured his aides to produce connections between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Al Qaeda: an overview of the scenario in the Times, as well as that paper’s analysis of the accusations’ political impact: “At the worst possible moment, it undercuts Mr. Bush on the issue that he has made the unapologetic centerpiece of his administration and a linchpin of his re-election campaign: his handling of the global war on terror.”

In his regular column, Paul Krugman places this incident in the context of the Bush administration’s penchant for secrecy and obfuscation. Similarly, in the Washington Post, Richard Cohen examines the administration’s habit of casting aspersion on its critics: “ The White House has opened its guns on Clarke. He is being contradicted and soon, as with poor [former Treasury Secretary Paul] O’Neill, his sanity and probity will be questioned.”

That paper also gives some background on Clarke’s character, noting that he is a registered Republican. The L.A. Times takes a more detailed look at the White House’s coordinated and notably aggressive attack against Clarke, and includes notes from an interview that Clarke gave the paper on Monday.

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