Foreign Policy devotes an entire issue to a review of Robert Kagan’s 10-year-old essay “Power and Weakness,” which famously—or once famously—declared that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” I can’t say that you won’t learn something by reading the issue, but I also can’t say that the exercise will be worth your…
Author: Alan Vanneman
Who writes this guy’s copy?
President Obama has just launched this mighty missile at the Supreme Court: “Ultimately, I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” Well, if overturning an act of Congress were unprecedented,…
Upper Austrian Jazz Orchestra—“Ask Me Now”
The Upper Austrian Jazz Orchestra plays “Ask Me Now” by Thelonious Monk, arranged & conducted by Michael Gibbs, featuring Christian Maurer on tenor saxophone and Primus Sitter on guitar. Recorded on April 16th 2010 in Zagreb at the Vatroslav Lisinski Hall. Posted by “UAJO1991”
If centipedes could talk ….
I don’t know if we’d bother to listen. Yeah, that’s a centipede on the table and a duck in the sauce pan. Or is it a swan? Bauhaus Ben, the Pennsylvania puzzler, whose work is rarely confused with Andrew Wyeth, comes up with this kitchen group, where it’s so quiet you can hear the myriapods…
The Grandfather of all Tick-Tocks
“Il Tick-Tock di Tutti Tick-Tocks”? “Tick-Tock Mania”? “Tick-Tocks R Us”? “Tick-Tock Around the Clock”? Anyway, over at the New York Times, Matt Bai has yet another Tick-Tock on that mother of all non-events, the Obama-Boehner non-budget deal, that died aborning back in July. This lemon has already been squeezed pretty dry, but Bai still gets…
You’re funny, Justice Scalia! You’re a funny man! You’re also a fat-assed, self-congratulatory liar, and a shitty constitutional scholar to boot!
Okay, is that enough persiflage for one headline? Sometimes El Nino gets it right, and the “liberals” (seriously “so-called” liberals, in my book) get it wrong, as in U.S. v. Comstock, in which only Justices Scalia and Thomas had the intelligence to argue that the federal government had no authority to imprison convicted sex offenders…
Does ObamaCare Have a Prayer?
A week ago, I would have said yes. I would have said that there was no way that perennial swing man Anthony Kennedy would have the nerve to take the ax to a really major piece of congressional legislation, something that hasn’t happened since 1935. But that was then. The universally derided performance of Solicitor…
How holy art thou?
There is such a thing as exile, an irrevocable renunciation of everything in one’s familiar surroundings that hinders one from attaining the ideal of holiness. Exile is a disciplined heart, unheralded wisdom, an unpublicized understanding, a hidden life, masked ideals. It is unseen meditation, the striving to be humble, a wish for poverty, the longing…
Jonathan Chait, having discovered that Obama isn’t that liberal, prefers not to be reminded of that fact
Last week, Jonathan Chait, heretofore one of President Obama’s most passionate defenders, wrote a bitter piece in New York magazine entitled “How Obama Tried to Sell Out Liberalism in 2011,” bouncing off the latest “what went wrong” tick-tock in a long series of what went wrong tick-tocks on the Obama Administration, this one written by…
The unerring perceptions of David Denby
In his current review of The Hunger Games in the New Yorker, Dave describes Liam Hemsworth as looking “like a larger Taylor Lautner.” This is funnier if, like me, you don’t know who either of these people are. As for the film itself, Dave struggles bravely, yet uselessly, against its ineluctable unavoidability. Leo DiCaprio, move…