Fight the Press

This is terrible:

Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

(via Andrew Sullivan)

ill-conceived

Had the aim been to attract much traffic with a clever gimmick, this is the blog you would be reading now. Yet, do not infer great amounts of rancor nor bitterness. A good idea is a good idea. And those pictures are hard to hate.

(via BuzzFeed)

Colbert at The New Yorker Festival

Zachary Kanin has put up quite the amusing post about Stephen Colbert's appearance The New Yorker festival. Colbert evidently covered a lot of ground:

On the philosophical implication of running for President: “We cast the show into the puddle of reality, and reported on our own ripples.”

On being kicked out of the Presidential election: “They tell you when you’re a child that anyone can run for President. But apparently not you, Stephen Colbert.”

On what he will do to an audience member’s friend who is an intern at “The Colbert Report”: “I will grope him.”

"I put sometimes the cartoons in the bookstore in the window."

The New Yorker had some kind of festival recently and they posted some mini-profiles of people who attended. Wilfred Merkel, 65, of Germany seems quite the charming man; he's the one that, when asked what section of the magazine he reads first, said that he puts "sometimes the cartoons in the bookstore in the window." To the question of which contributor to the magazine he'd like to sit next to on a long plane ride, he answered "I would like to find the magazine on board the airplane!" It's fortunate that Mr. Merkel's charm ends the slideshow because immediately preceding him is an attendee who evokes more ambivalent feelings.

Palin, Poet

"Challenge to a Cynic"

You are a cynic.
Because show me where
I have ever said
That there's absolute proof
That nothing that man
Has ever conducted
Or engaged in,
Has had any effect,
Or no effect,
On climate change.

(To C. Gibson, ABC News, Sept. 11, 2008)


"On Reporters"

It's funny that
A comment like that
Was kinda made to,
I don't know,
You know ...

Reporters.

(To K. Couric, CBS News, Sept. 25, 2008)

(via cf, original source here)

Harry Belafonte and DNC '68

(via BB)

“I didn’t know you were Catholic”

This is some weird shit going down.

In the Roosevelt Room after the session, the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., literally bent down on one knee as he pleaded with Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, not to “blow it up” by withdrawing her party’s support for the package over what Ms. Pelosi derided as a Republican betrayal.

“I didn’t know you were Catholic,” Ms. Pelosi said, a wry reference to Mr. Paulson’s kneeling, according to someone who observed the exchange. She went on: “It’s not me blowing this up, it’s the Republicans.”

Mr. Paulson sighed. “I know. I know.”