Here comes the third debate. As I was saying about the first debate, “Will voters ever get to see what those guys were scribbling so furiously?” I suspected the Ignoramus in Chief was doodling his mantra, “significant progress,” and Kerry his counter-mantra, “four more years of the same.” James Wolcott figures debaters’ notes, in future, […]

A stiff maverick is a hard man to please,” Leon Freilich messages, adding a lovely and appropriate rhyme inspired by yesterday’s item about a Jersey City madam empowered by technology (as predicted, though not mentioned, by this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics). CALLING ALL GIRLS Belle de nuit,What’s your fee?Belle de jour,More than a […]

A message from Repulski with less than an hour to go: “Can’t face this silly debate. After a disastrous news day like this, if Kerry can’t exploit it the man isn’t qualified to walk poodles on the Upper East Side.” EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Will the wonders of technology never cease? Two mavericks in economics — Edward C. Prescott, 63, and Finn E. Kydland, 60 — were just awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize for demonstrating that “innovative technology” and some other stuff “play a much greater role in causing booms and recession than fluctuations in demand.” In other words, […]

How many gaffes and factual errors will be heard in tomorrow night’s third presidential debate? It’s anyone’s guess. But our hothead Ignoramus in Chief is sure to make the most of his chance to display more of them. Which reminds me: Steven Lubet, a constitutional law professor at Northwestern University, picked up on the ninny’s […]

“American authorities have shut down 20 independent media centres by seizing their British-based webservers,” the London Guardian reports this morning. An “American-owned web hosting company” was forced “to hand over two servers” used by “an international media network which covers social justice issues and provides a ‘news-wire,’ to which its users contribute. The websites affected […]

Carlos Perez says he was so angry about 9/11 he quit his job as a firefighter and joined the Marines. “To be honest, I just wanted to take revenge.” He’s now in Iraq in a platoon known as the “81s” — so named for its 81 mm. mortar rounds — fighting with the 1st Battalion, […]

Over the weekend James Wolcott offered les mots justes on the second debate: “George Bush looked like a blister about to pop. Loud, mouthy, swaggering, interested only in hearing himself lay down the law, he behaved like a verbally abusive husband. Not a wifebeater but a browbeater with a bar-fighter’s grin.” As mentioned here earlier, imagine the […]

In last night’s second presidential debate, the Ninny in Chief once again demonstrated his congenital inadequacies as a statesman, much less as a debater. Alessandra Stanley read my mind in her description of him. Whether he’s snickering, winking, or getting hot under the collar, he’s just plain irritating. The guy’s a complete jerk. Imagine the […]

If there’s an ideology in “Lysistrata,” the antiwar play by Aristophanes, it’s the idea that a comedy 2,400 years old can still make us laugh — even when the double entendres and smutty jokes are delivered in Greek to an English-speaking audience of contemporary New Yorkers who not so long ago had Rudy Giuliani as mayor. […]

I’m beginning to feel like Johnny One-Note: Here’s a revealing footnote to the definitive WMD report by the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group. It sketches how technical experts who doubted that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons were silenced by the Bush gang. Although it appeared in August 2003 at WorldNetDaily, it came to a Straight Up […]

Will America stand still for the corruption of its democracy? That’s the real question voters are about to answer — whether they will accept The Big Lie or repudiate it, whether they will go along with The Liar or throw him out of office. On Nov. 2, voters will have their chance to redeem America’s […]

Will voters ever get to see what those guys were scribbling so furiously on their notepads? Our guess is Mr. Sourpuss was doodling his Republican mantra, “significant progress,” and reminding himself not to curl his lip or spit too much venom. Although he was aiming for gravitas (that much overused word), he managed instead to throw […]

Paul Bremer now says, “We never had enough troops on the ground” in Iraq. This confirms Tom Friedman’s description of the Rumsfeld Doctrine, noted in his column on Sunday, as “just enough troops to lose.” Meantime, if you didn’t read Sunday’s immense, detailed report by David Barst and Jeff Gerth on how the White House conjured […]

Like the far more celebrated Nobel Prizes, the Darwin Awards have just been announced. Unlike the Nobels, however, the Darwins honor people who improve the human gene pool “by removing themselves from it. Of necessity, this honor is bestowed posthumously.” This year’s nominees, according to Insight magazine (which describes itself as a sister publication of […]

Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi came halfway clean today. He admitted, in his first speech to the interim national assembly in Baghdad, that the country’s “nascent police force is underequipped and lacks the respect needed from the public to quell the insurgency,” Edward Wong reports. “The tone of the speech was a sharp departure from […]

On the evidence of his first column in two months, the time off revived him. Tom Friedman was back Sunday with a bright thought: “Each time the Bush team had to choose between doing the right thing in the war on terrorism or siding with its political base and ideology, it chose its base and […]