Media

This, from Roger Simon, is the kind of political commentary that shoots for “outside the beltway” and just becomes patronizing. Mocking the media coverage of Gov. Sarah Palin (R-Alaska):
Listen to how “rambling” and “disjointed” she is. Once upon a time in American politics, this was known as being “plain-spoken,” but that time has gone.
OK. From [...]

John Gizzi talked to departing Minnesota Republican Party Chairman Ron Carey, who breaks from Norm Coleman’s position on the Senate result and argues that the count was unfair.
The bottom line here is that ballots were inarguably treated differently, and the Supreme Court, in reviewing the case, never dealt with that fact.  In Franken-friendly counties such [...]

When I watched Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s questioning of the government’s lawyer in the extraordinary rendition case of Arar v. Ashcroft in December, which I wrote about in detail Wednesday, I was struck by Sotomayor’s immediate grasp of the troubling implications of the government’s position.
As Sotomayor put it to Jonathan Cohn, the Justice Department [...]

This is curious: twice in two weeks Politico has given rather sensational headlines to stories, then changed them later in the day. The original headline for Mike Allen’s preview of the president’s Cairo speech, which has been preserved in a syndicated version:
Obama walks Muslim minefield
The headline that replaced this later in the day:
Obama faces Mideast [...]

The New York Times reviews the Fox News and radio host’s stand-up tour.
One of Mr. Beck’s favorite rhetorical tactics is a combination of misdirection and guilt by association: he doesn’t say nasty things about ethnic minorities or homosexuals, but he will slip in a reference to how all our cars will soon be built by [...]

The seven-year-old old-line biweekly conservative magazine, which has been seeking a financial “angel” for a while, is finally buckling and going monthly.
The American Conservative, endangered though it has been by the economic collapse, will survive. An outpouring of support from readers (and authors) heartened us to continue; that boost, plus some restructuring and an ambitious [...]

Well, we knew things were bad for newspapers these days, but this is a really sad sign:  The Philadelphia Inquirer has hired John Yoo — the notorious former Office of Legal Counsel lawyer and architect of the “torture memos” that not only narrowed the definition of torture to exclude waterboarding and most other widely recognized [...]

Byron York has responded to the criticism of his column on the “white-black divide” of presidential support by (yawn) crying that he’s been accused of racism.
I wrote that citing Obama’s “sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are” … Maybe “across-the-board” would have been [...]

Michael Barone, longtime political number-cruncher (his Almanac of American Politics was first published in 1972) and increasingly conservative pundit, has moved from U.S. News and World Report to The Washington [D.C.] Examiner.
“I am very excited and pleased to have the chance to join The Examiner at this challenging time for journalism and for our country,” [...]

The headline was former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s 20 percent plurality in the presidential preference question, but I think the rest of the Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll was rather more interesting. Here were CPAC attendees choices for “favorite conservative media personality.”
Rush Limbaugh – 26 percent
Glenn Beck – 17 percent
Sean Hannity – 11 percent
Bill [...]