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Bad blood between cohosts?

The story is that she "wasn't good at her job" -- she was too serious and too awkward and didn't fit into the show's "happy talk" format -- but Matt Lauer definitely didn't like her and he's gotten to be as much of a prima donna now as Bryant Gumbel was when Lauer replaced him.

Maybe people are reading too much into this. It’s not a serious look at libertarian philosophy or libertarian factions. Somebody just notices that Obama seems to be calling for less government when it comes to abortion and more government when it comes to everything else — that he seems to be invoking liberty here and opposing it everywhere else. Where you want to go after that and how you want to characterize his position is up to you.

I'm embarrassed to say that I've never seen an episode of Fringe.

Why? (Why is it embarrassing, not why didn't you ever watch an episode of an X Files remix?)

Why? I’ll tell you why.. Because this program has turned into ‘African-American idol’. The ghetto worship this program promotes is sickening. If you don’t sing like you’re in an inner-city church revival, well then.. “You just can’t sing”. African-American Idol is the most racist program on television. Herding young teens into the ghetto lifestyle is American Idol’s mission. There’s nothing ‘American’ about this show in the least bit.

Geez, there's so much in there that's questionable to say the least.

Promoting a gospel-like style of singing is "herding young teens into the ghetto lifestyle"?

And there's nothing ‘American’ about current American popular music?

... I don't know whether Darrel's background is Muslim or Christian ...

Let's see. You are making all kinds of wild claims about Darrell Issa, but haven't even bothered to find out if he's Christian or Muslim? That doesn't inspire confidence in your opinions.

Noam Chomsky praised Nixon as one of the most ‘Progressive President’

Thirty years later. "Richard Nixon — in many respects the last liberal president." Chomsky wasn't anywhere near so friendly when Nixon was president.

I'd say Obama was more like Carter than Nixon (or Putin or Chavez).

Remember, the Israelis flew in to Baghdad and blew up the breeder reactor they bought from the French.

1981? That's not evidence of what the Iraq were doing in 2003.

Also, the IAEA refused to let the U.S. remove 500 tons of Uranium we found.

It looks like that was eventually sent to Canada. The argument is that it wasn't "weapons grade." I don't know how to assess that.

If possible weapon-making material is there but isn't processed and there's no ongoing project of making weapons, then are there WMDs? Is preemptive war necessary or advisable, given what the costs would be?

One point I’d like to make, is that we are mostly unable to see the ourselves as they see us. In particular, conservative talk radio. Mark Levin is my favorite. He is the talker who I think is most aligned with how I think on the issues. But when I step back and try to listen to him from a liberal standpoint, he is unlikable.

Good point. Once you disagree with somebody, his or her every mannerism can set you off. The same things that people applaud in those they agree with set their teeth on edge in people they disagree with. It's the "I have a healthy self-respect. You are proud. He is arrogant" thing.

But we should also have a conservative version of Colbert, Maher, Stewart, and the late night talkers. They win people over with humor.

Like Red Eye. It's on at about 3 AM, though.

When someone makes me laugh, I might listen for a while, even if I disagree with parts of what he says.

Maybe, maybe not. Rush Limbaugh can be very funny, but there are people who wouldn't be caught dead listening to him.

You've also got a divide between somebody who gives a marked political spin and somebody who's less ideological. It can be hard to find a balance. Personalities who can downplay the ideology get more of the uncommitted listeners or viewers. So more Jon Stewart and less Maher or Colbert. Maybe less Dennis Miller and more Norm MacDonald (though it's not quite the same thing).

If it catches on, what are rich college d-bags going to do to be different?

“We all wondered how Harry Reid had Mitt Romney’s taxes,” Republican National Committee spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski told The Daily Caller.

That did cross my mind too at the time.

But if Mitt Romney really did pay no income taxes for ten years, he had no business running for president, so I assumed Harry Reid didn't know what he was talking about.

Maybe her quote is taken out of context, but if the RNC did believe Reid and supported Romney anyway they're a bigger problem than anybody dreamed.

A problem maybe with how "race" is translated into other languages and what the connotations are.

In some countries it may imply skin color, in others ethnic origins, language, and culture.

Also, some peoples may be more honest than others, or less afraid to express their opinions. And the data may be pretty spotty from some of those countries.

"Former"?

He's still there, though sometimes it doesn't seem like it.

He's basically an empty suit.

If he saved anything from his basketball and business careers, he probably didn't need the money.

That doesn't make him a great person or a great mayor, but it's likely he wasn't in it for the money.

I guess Google won after all.

Definitely Long Island. Some of the jackets say "King's Park High."

But how do you know it's 1990, though? This is the look many people still associate with Greater New York.

Here’s Chris Matthews lamenting that Obama doesn’t seem to have his hands on the wheel of the ship of state. That’s fine; the important question is why. Is it because, as the press so often claimed about Bush, he’s “incurious” about what his underlings are doing? Or is it because the people steering know what direction he wants to go in?

If they really wanted it done successfully they would have delegated to more competent people and we wouldn't be hearing about it now. We might never hear about it. Possibly the IRS scandal would have been too big to hide, but it doesn't seem like they chose the best person to put the plan into effect.

It might be commonplace Chicago politics to have "your guy" in an agency. Somebody who sees to it that things that are in your interest get done. Somebody who doesn't need to be told what to do, but jumps to action because he or she knows what's what.

But because you aren't giving instructions to that person, because he or she anticipates without being told what's to be done and does it, nothing can be traced back to you, and it can be impossible for outsiders to determine that what happened was anything more than overzealous subordinates going too far on their own.

Lucifer still prefers South Beach, though.

Swanson was a private investigator for years, and then a graphic designer. A father of two grown sons, he got laid off from his job last year and was looking for an adventure.

Maybe the big adventure was seeing how far he could make his money go.

Sort of. It's not really a firm or principled thing.

Obama's stock is going down and they've got enough of it that they can sell a little off.

They're still very much invested in his positions and they'd love to crow "Obama is back!," but holding onto him too tightly now may drag them down as well, so for tactical reasons they're creating a distance between Obama and themselves.

It's Baz Luhrmann, the guy who put Bowie, Beck, and Bono on the soundtrack of his 1890s movie Moulin Rouge, and had his chorus singing lyrics from Labelle and Nirvana.

It can be jarring at first, but it's how he does things.

The one advice I'd give to Republicans is stop calling it a huge scandal. Stop saying it's a Watergate. Stop saying it's Iran-Contra. Let the facts speak for themselves. Have a special committee, a select committee, the facts will speak for themselves, pile 'em on; but don't exaggerate, don't run ads about Hillary. It feeds the narrative of the other side that it's only a political event. It is not. Just be quiet and present the facts.

That's actually not bad advice.

It's probably not going to affect how liberals behave, but better to be the person who says "This may not be Watergate but it's very important to get to the bottom of it" than the person who says "This is Watergate."

Better to be the person who can't be easily ignored or dismissed as obviously partisan, rather than the person who can.

Better not let your passions get in the way of your argument.

But politics nowadays is more about expressing emotion or striking poses than about formulating strategies to get things done.

Great cartoon!

Ayn Rand was no fan of C.S. Lewis. She called the famous apologist an “abysmal bastard,” a “monstrosity,” a “cheap, awful, miserable, touchy, social-meta­physical mediocrity,” a “pickpocket of concepts,” and a “God-damn, beaten mystic.”

Sounds like love. Looking forward to the movie. Debra Winger and Anthony Hopkins, again?

First of all, I was at least in part tongue in cheek -- semi-serious, semi-satirical as the saying goes.

Secondly, lot of that "aspiring rapper" or "aspiring DJ" stuff isn't serious. It means people perform on amateur nights and don't have any other more serious ambition, not that they're serious prospects working to achieve their goal.

Of course it costs more money to make a film than to rap, but my point was -- you can find that sort of pipe dreaming in other parts of the population. And judging from what's out there, it sometimes seems like every privileged White youth out there is making lousy movies, or wanting to.

Finally, I wanted to get away from the whole "Heh, heh, silly Negro" mentality. Odds are he won't make it. I'd go with college if I were him, but good luck to him all the same.

Maybe across the board in terms of income levels or classes, but drinking was more common in the cities than in the countryside.

Some bootlegging rural counties were an exception and some people could get their hands on liquor wherever they were, but in much of small town America, booze was hard to get and the 20s weren't Roaring that much.

From what I can tell, CNN's version of the memo is as edited as anything they're criticizing.

... the Japanese, who targeted only the populations that rebelled against them.

Not really true. Sure, invading armies kill those who resist, but 1) resisting is different from rebelling, and 2) a lot of those "populations" included women and children.

To say, the Japanese weren't as bad as the Nazis in WWII isn't really saying much. Just about anybody was better than the Nazis. What does that have to do with Japanese conduct in the war? It's not like they were fighting Nazis.

The Nazis can say they were sorry, but the "sorry" doesn't really cut it when you've systematically wiped out tens of millions out people way outside of even medieval rules of conflict.

That's a pretty off-the-wall comment as well. Where were the Nazis who said "sorry" and who here made reference to them? Maybe you've got personal reasons for going where you went, but it doesn't change the Japanese record in the war.

Probably for about the same reason so many White guys think they can write or direct movies ...

It was called “The Jazz Age”. Using rap or hip-hop music is anachronistic. Will they be using iPhones to communicate also?

There weren't cars or guns or television sets in Elizabethan England or Renaissance Italy, but Luhrmann's "Romeo + Juliet" has all those things.

For better or for worse it's commonplace now to produce Shakespeare in anything but the dress of his own period or the times he wrote about. There's nothing wrong in principle about resetting an adaptation in a different era than the original work.

The film could be a real turkey (knowing Baz's work, that's to be expected), but a straight recreation of the 1920s probably would have been a a yawn-fest, especially since the 1974 film tried to do just that, and largely succeeded.

The funny thing, though ...

... is that what survived of the actual lost 1926 film doesn't look much like the stereotypical 1920s.

When I say "welfare queen," do you think of a poor white woman living in Appalachia outside a trailer, with a bunch of dirty kids in diapers running around, or do you think of Lakeesha, sitting on her welfare throne with buckets of food stamps all around her?

Kind of funny. I wouldn't assume a welfare recipient was Black or White or anything else.

Dawn's the one who throws out "welfare queen" and "Lakeesha", but it's her fellow Whites who are supposed to be prejudiced.

Do you ever find yourself having conversations with other whites and when you talk about blacks you whisper the word "blacks"? If you are not ashamed of what you are saying, why are you whispering?

How often do you have "conversations with other Whites about Blacks"? What I notice is people having conversations about things that are embarrassing and whispering the race or ethnicity or religion of the embarrassment. And isn't the use of the word "Black" as a noun to describe people now considered racist?

If I told you I was representing an alleged drug dealer, in your mind is he black or white? (He's white by the way.)

Google image Dawn Cutaia. An awful lot of her defendants are African-American.

On the Internet, public-private partnership tends to be associated with corporatism and fascism.

But this doesn't relate very will to real-world public-private partnerships in transportation, education, utilities, sanitation, or corrections.

What Obama's doing -- crony capitalism, picking winners and losers to reward or punish -- is something else as well.

The article doesn't say why the flag and his memorial are connected.

It doesn't. Either Colby or his friends are into Confederate flags and identify them with things he liked to do: "mudding, hunting, fishing, being with his buddies, Ford trucks, that sort of thing." It sounds a little like they went with the first thing they thought of, rather than tinkering with the original concept for a while to improve it.

Somebody's bound to bring up Che or Mao shirts (but when was the last time anybody ever wore a Mao shirt?). It looks like the ACLU would defend students who wore Che or Mao or Confederate or pro-gun or anti-gun or pro-gay or (within reason) anti-gay t-shirts, so there's not a double standard there. They do object to flying Confederate flags near court houses or over public buildings, though.

Important note: The idea of “public/private partnerships” was originally innovated by national socialists (fascists), after regular socialist nationalization schemes had failed so miserably. It became the centerpiece to “fascist economics” in national socialist economies, as nationalization of industry had been in socialist economies.

Not so much. Public-private partnerships have been around for a very long time, in the form of state-granted monopolies.

The latest incarnation does have a lot to do with the failure of socialism, but it was driven by people like Margaret Thatcher.

Whatever "public-private partnerships are in America today, for Thatcher they were a way of getting away from state-owned and state-run enterprises, and introducing free market incentives into public services. Stephen Harper is doing something similar in Canada now.

That may be different from what's going on in the US now, but the talk about fascism doesn't help clarify just what public-private partnerships are and how they originated. I don't disagree with the rest of what you say, though.

Rail bump!

Presbyterian with a small p. Congregationalists and Presbyterians more or less agreed about theology. They came from different areas and disagreed a bit over how the church was to be organized beyond the local level.

The Congregationalists were English or New Englanders, and the Presbyterians were Scots or Irish or Scots-Irish. The fighters at Bunker Hill were largely Congregationalists (Unitarians gradually emerging from the established Congregational Church).

As the country moved westward the New England Congregationalist and Ulster Presbyterian streams could grow together, so that New Englanders like the Beechers might become Presbyterians in the West.

The Scots Highlanders of North Carolina, though, were largely Presbyterian, but Tory, having already lost much to the English (and their Lowland Scots allies) and not wanting to lose again.

At least, you know what you're getting with Baz Luhrmann. You know it's going to be excessive and splashy and have a high trash factor. So there's little point in complaining about the result or attacking the film.

I probably will see it on video sooner or later without expecting much, and probably I'll like it more than Moulin Rouge. I don't think I could like it less.

I didn't mind the earlier version. It sort of defined the novel for me (and for other people too, though I guess we aren't supposed to admit it). It might be interesting to see a new take on the story

NBC also cancelled The New Normal, Animal Practice, Smash, Guys With Kids, Up All Night and Deception

I have only ever seen one of those shows. Apparently not many other people watched them either.

They all seem to be not-to-clever retreads of other shows that were successful, or else generic variants on sitcom formulas.

It was clever of them to sneak cancellation of "The New Normal" somewhere in the middle of all the others so as not to antagonize gay groups.

Martinique is 90% Black. So is Guadaloupe. St. Martin and St. Barts must be about the same. I'd suppose most of the land was already in the hands of the descendants of slaves.

Given that these are small islands, there may not be that much property to divide up, and there would be far too many potential claimants for anybody to get very much, all the more so given that it would be foolish to split up profitable resorts or turn them over to smallholders.

One of my favorite teachers at Yale, John Morton Blum, was an academic and a liberal (not a "librul" as I have come to use the word) in the classical sense.

That depends on how you want to define "liberal in a classical sense." Blum wasn't a libertarian, which is how many people would define the term nowadays, more of a liberal in the mould of the two Roosevelts.

After 911 is was SOP for the Bush administration to go on heightened security on the anniversary of 911, why in the world would we not be on heightened security? Someone had to reverse the Bush policy on 911. Who and why?

By most accounts there was heightened security during the 9/11/2011 anniversary. Not so much for 9/11/2012.

The problem -- and the culpability -- may have been in not bringing the Benghazi consulate up to shape in terms of security, rather than in changing general operating procedures at all embassies.

I don't know how much credence to give these rumors that may spring from internal rivalries.

Given everything we know about CBS going back for decades, it's surprising that Atkisson wasn't silenced long before this.

If she's still following the story and getting airtime, whatever the resistance and rumors, it's an unexpected positive sign.

Yesterday it was Whitney and 1600 Penn, today it's Matthew Perry's freshman sitcom Go On and Brian Williams's weekly news magazine Rock Center.

Whitney: Not the absolute worst sitcom ever made.

1600 Penn: Pretty much the worst sitcom ever made. Would it have been too much to stick with current reality and make the First Family Black? I guess it would have.

Go On: Rather not. Between Friends and whatever Sorkin show he was on for a few weeks, does anybody really want more Matthew Perry?

Rock Center: My heart sank every time I heard Brian Williams's pompous voice telling us what must-miss stories he'd come up with this week. Maybe if his daughter hosted the show ...

Provocative. One thing I do notice about those people, though, is that however secure their own families may be, they’ve been known to undercut other people’s family lives by encouraging social trends that can have destructive consequences.

Ben may be the Obama toad behind the Benghazi cover up. Brother David is colluding. These brothers are vile and dishonest. They illustrate two current day realities. 1) The Obama administration is incompetent and ruinous. 2) The MSM are not true journalists, but subtle propagandists and a detriment to the American people.

So far as I know, the only things we know for sure about David Rhodes at this point are that he's head of CBS News and he's Ben Rhodes's brother. You could be right about all this, but the all-out condemnation's a little premature.

Sure. "Reactionary" was the headline writer's word. Philbrick's description was "profoundly conservative" -- different ways of characterizing and framing the same reality.

Britain's attitude towards the colonies had been characterized by Edmund Burke as "a wise and salutary neglect." Under George III, British governments tried to change that to get the colonies to pay Britain for their own defense and for the war that had just been fought with the French and the Indians. So you could view Britain as the party who wanted to change things.

I wouldn't get hung up on the idea of one side or the other being the modern-day progressives. Too much has changed since the 18th century for us to slap 21st century labels on the political positions of that era. But a phrase like "to the right of Louis XIV" doesn't make much sense. Absolute monarchy was a new idea. Absolute monarchs wanted to change things -- and did.

Thinking that, say, if the Stuart monarchs had won their battles with Parliament nothing would have changed since the 1700s doesn't really add up. More or less absolute monarchy did win in France and forces for change lined up behind it -- until they no longer did and backed revolution. Something similar might have happened in Britain, had James II or his son or grandson have been victorious. Of course there are counter-examples, times and places where change did slow down or stop, like Spain in the same period, but one shouldn't assume that if things in the past had happened differently conditions would have frozen history as they was then.

The "Our nation is based on English Principles of Law" theory collides with the reality of the fact that it was a direct contradiction of English law for us to even exist. That there was nothing like what we did anywhere in English law is also readily apparent.

England had at least two revolutions in the 17th century, and when our revolution started the colonists were claiming the rights of Englishmen, not independence from the crown. The United Kingdom at various times had been something of a confederation, as the name suggests. Scotland had an independent parliament until 1707, Ireland until 1801.

To be sure Switzerland was an example of a confederation of republics, and the founders knew of it. But it was more like a looser confederation of independent cantons when they were around. A federated republic like our own was slow to develop. John Adams certainly did study the Swiss cantonal republics, but the founders also had the example of Ancient Greek and Renaissance Italian republics to draw on.

I'm not sure about the details of Swiss history, but reverence for English common law went deep in the colonies and later in the new nation. Common law was something that evolved over time through cases. Thus it wasn't as statist as Continental civil law. The founders were largely trained in the common law and built their case against Parliament and later the king in the tradition of common law principles.

Russell Kirk who voted for an open Socialist?

He was in his twenties and in the army and voted for Norman Thomas as a protest vote and in tribute to Thomas's earlier isolationist speeches.

I'm not sure that makes it okay (maybe it makes it worse), but everybody makes mistakes in their twenties.

My understanding is that Roosevelt came to believe in large cartels that would be in private ownership but regulated "in the public interest" -- quite a shift for someone who'd made a name for himself as the "Trust Buster."

More here.

Two things about TR:

1) The whole 19th century lived under the shadow of the French Revolution. Thinking at the time was that government needed to assume a role in protecting the poor against the rich and the weak against the strong to prevent another such revolution.

TR wasn't favorable to the populism of the 1890s, a push for more government from below, because he saw it as destabilizing. When the opportunity came for more government from above with the progressive movement, he didn't oppose it.

2) As president, Roosevelt talked a lot of boilerplate about things he wasn't going to do -- the standard talk about the widening gap between rich and poor, etc. He wasn't supporting socialistic measures then. It was just the sort of thing a "patrician" President would say.

After he'd been out of office for a while and wanted back in, he got more serious about all that. Or did he? Maybe he just found a new set of policies and sharpened his rhetoric. In any event, I wouldn't necessarily assume that the Roosevelt of 1901 or 1906 was the same as the Roosevelt of 1912.

What about the Washington Senators?

What about the Ottawa Senators?

I never took Latin, but I'm pretty sure their logo isn't a senator.

Okay, but it’s never just a matter of our tariff. You have to look at the tariffs that other countries slap on our products in retaliation.