Archive for June 9th, 2008
June 9th, 2008
Kevin Hassett, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and an adviser to John McCain, SAYS all this gloom-and-doom talk about the economy is a media plot to get Democrats elected in November.
Hassett says media “treatment of the economy would be much different if there were a Democrat in the White House today.”
Damn media! Y’know, they did the same thing to Herbert Hoover, just when things were starting to turn the corner.
UPDATE: Now the media are TELLING US things are so bad that sales of Spam are soaring.
June 9th, 2008
Robert Novak, the venerable Prince of Darkness, SAYS there’s a buzz to the effect that Chicago congressman Rahm Emmanuel (above) might get the appointment to Barack Obama’s Senate seat after the November election.
June 9th, 2008
It isn’t often that Time magazine’s Mark Halperin makes even one good point in the stuff he writes, but THIS TIME he’s made 15 of them on the subject of factors working against John McCain in his contest with Barack Obama.
June 9th, 2008
You can hardly turn around anymore without hearing or reading about somebody having been “thrown under the bus” — especially in the world of politics (HERE, for example).
What are the roots of this peculiar expression? Newsweek offered this little ESSAY on the matter a few months ago.
June 9th, 2008
In the prepared text of his infamous speech of last Tuesday night, John McCain had a line about media coverage of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
When Newsweek later asked McCain about that line, he said it was dropped from the text when he delivered the speech. “I’m not in the business of commenting on the press and their coverage,” he told the magazine.
Newsweek took McCain at his word, not bothering to check the videotape of the speech. Jonathan Martin of Politico did the same (as we see HERE).
But, in fact, McCain did use the line in question, no matter his categorical protestations to the contrary.
(Scroll down to the comments on Martin’s Politico piece. A few readers set the record straight on what McCain did or didn’t say about Hillary’s press coverage.)
What bothers me is how this guy could make a statement in a nationally televised speech — and then deny having made that statement. This isn’t just a matter of how the statement was interpreted or what was really meant (as in, for example, Barack Obama’s “bitterness” speech). Rather, this is a case of McCain specifically addressing a subject that he later claims not to have addressed.
Strange.
UPDATE: Politico’s Jonathan Martin finally ACKNOWLEDGES that McCain did utter the line at issue. But Martin doesn’t admit to having muffed the matter to begin with.
June 9th, 2008
So, this British guy with the wonderful name Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has a COLUMN in one of the London papers this morning about how the global economy is teetering on the brink of something unfortunate.
It’s a fascinating read (if one can actually be fascinated by stuff one doesn’t really understand) — and it’s made all the more so by the fact that the average Joe and Mary Schmoe are helpless to avoid the seemingly imminent disaster.
By the way, be sure to check out the comments at the end of Evans-Pritchard’s piece.
