Free Republic

The awful launch week for the over-hyped, expected bestseller The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, by controversial author Joe McGinniss, just got worse. Much worse. After a week of universally scathing pans from the reflexively anti-Palin establishment media, McGinniss now faces the fight of his literary life: the accusation that he seems to have knowingly submitted a book to his publisher, Crown/Random House, that was filled with unproved “tawdry gossip” and rumors that lacked “factual evidence.”

DAILY NOTEBOOK.... The Iconoclast (www.iconoclast.ca) Better Than Sticks and Stones...... October 9, 2002: How does that little children's ditty go? Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me! Well, that might be an appropriate maxim for the playground, but it certainly doesn't apply to modern-day North American politics. Name calling has turned into one of the most sophisticated weapons of the political left -- and probably its most effective stratagem in the cut and thrust of everyday political combat. And what name calling would we be referring to? Why the use of such pleasant labels...