Free Republic

This month is bookended by two tragic anniversaries, which should serve as reflection points for not only the conservative movement but also the torpid, insular world of contemporary political journalism. While the untimely death of Andrew Breitbart has been discussed at length by numerous online news outlets-most of which would not exist but for his pioneering work in this field-yesterday marked the ninth year we’ve been without an equally brilliant American-by way of Winnipeg-iconoclast. If Breitbart was a blowtorch to doctrinaire leftist, media-regurgitated nostrums, engulfing them in his incandescent fury, then Cathy Seipp was a scalpel, skillfully and wittily excising...

March 22, 2007, 1:35 p.m. Our Girl, CathyR.I.P. By Rob Long These things take a while, I’m told, to sink in. Cathy Seipp, my longtime friend, had been fighting lung cancer for years. Most of that time, I told her, I sort of felt sorry for the cancer — Cathy marching around to doctor’s offices and chemotherapy sessions with no-nonsense purpose; Cathy explaining to a Blue Cross bureaucrat, with restrained irritation, that it made no sense for the insurer to suddenly declare, now that a certain type of chemotherapy was showing some success with her cancer, that it was...

Catherine Seipp, 49; critic took on Times By Valerie J. Nelson, Times Staff Writer 2:57 PM PDT, March 21, 2007 Catherine Seipp, a writer and media critic who became known in the 1990s for her pointed coverage of the Los Angeles Times in Buzz magazine, has died. She was 49. Seipp, a nonsmoker who was diagnosed with lung cancer five years ago, died Wednesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, her family announced. She was a longtime resident of Silver Lake. More recently, the conservative Seipp wrote on controversial topics of the day in a weekly column called "From...

Columnist ill Catherine Seipp, longtime West Coast columnist for National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com), remained hospitalized yesterday. "She's sedated, with painkillers among other things," daughter Maia reported yesterday at her mother's blog (http://cathyseipp.journalspace.com). Mrs. Seipp was diagnosed in 2002 with inoperable lung cancer. "Lungs collapsed so right now we just want to make sure she has dignity and is not in pain," Maia wrote yesterday. "The doctor says she has a couple days left. ... I'm at her bedside now, holding her hand. I tell her she has 292 comments on the latest blog post ... but she just squeezes my...

Above, thanks to Vik Rubenfeld, is a pic of me, Lawrence O'Donnell and his furiously throbbing neck veins from the Dennis Miller show the other night. (And thanks to Emmanuelle for providing an almost identical shot until Vik made this crystal clear one available. Not shown: former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, the other Varsity Panelist.) What led to all this was a discussion of how Arnold Schwarzenegger's popularity is sinking because of his fight with the California teachers unions -- which balk at the idea that some teachers are better (or worse) than others, and should be rewarded...or...