Reading in The Washington Post the excerpt from Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward‘s new book, I was reminded of nothing so much as –me! In The Coup, I described the people Vice President Godwin Pope saw gathered on the floor of the House of Representatives as he sat on the dais awaiting the president’s State of …
Dan Eggen and T.W. Farnam in The Washington Post today tell us about Super PACs, “a new political weapon. . . [that] has emerged in recent weeks, allowing independent groups to both raise and spend money at a pace that threatens to eclipse the efforts of political parties.” The report says that these committies spent …
George Blanda began playing pro football before I was born and concluded his career when I was 23, far too young and immature to understand him as anything but an anachronistic and vaguely humorous figure. Now I am trying to continue a career at an age far beyond that which Blanda had attained when he …
Friends of this blog know of my interest in the widespread use of CCTV in the UK. This past week, CCTV was very much in the news when a running camera captured a woman in Coventry named Mary Bale strolling down an ordinary suburban street and picking up an ordinary tabby cat, which she proceeded …
Thanks to my friend Rebecca Lavoie, one of my discoveries at Playboy (and yes, it’s LaVOY, not LaVWA), I was a guest today on Word of Mouth, a program on New Hampshire Public Radio, where Rebecca is a producer. I spoke to host Virginia Prescott (left) about my piece on lying in Details. Look out, …
My friend Michael Gross (left) had to know this would happen. In the September issue of Vanity Fair, a writer named Michael Joseph Gross (right) published a profile a profile of Sarah Palin which one can fairly describe as unflattering (“Anywhere you peel back the skin of Sarah Palin’s life, a sad and moldering strangeness …
Until I get a chance to read Tony Blair‘s memoir A Journey, reviews will have to suffice. Writing in The New Yorker, John Lanchester is not such a fan, although he offers a quote from Blair that is worth its weight in gold. “That Blair was a formidable politician,” writes Lanchester, “can be seen in …
As Lori Montgomery reports in the Washington Post, “Senate Republicans are rolling out a plan to permanently extend an array of expiring tax breaks that would deprive the Treasury of more than $4 trillion over the next decade, nearly doubling projected deficits over that period unless dramatic spending cuts are made. The measure, introduced by …
I just received a note on Facebook from my cousin, Walter King. He and I played together when we were six or seven or so, but then his family moved to Oklahoma. I have seen him but once in the intervening time, at a family reunion at the home of our cousin Charlotte, maybe 25 …
Christine O’Donnell‘s Tea Party-fueled victory over the seemingly safe establishment figure Mike Castle in Delaware is prompting no shortage of chin-stroking among the punditry, all wondering what this development, coming on the heels of all the other victories Tea Party candidates have had over Republican mainstays in GOP intra-party rumbles, is apt to mean for …