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The entire Mid-Atlantic region is in a terrible drought right now, although we got a few showers this weekend. It was most strange to visit Central Texas a week ago and see the fields a deep, rich green, while Maryland looks parched and dry.
One of my worst traits is that I love to watch and read about things I shouldn’t love to watch or read about. I have successfully limited my intake of gossip mags to in-flight reading, and I’m doing better about avoiding gossip sites, I guess, but I still have a major problem.
Time‘s Nancy Gibbs praised John F. Kennedy in mid-May as the model of how Mitt Romney should respond to potential voters who have theological misgivings about his quest for the presidency.
As a Salon Premium subscriber, I recently signed on for a free 12-month subscription to Reason. I had seen the magazine on occasion in public libraries, and the subscription has been rewarding enough that I’m likely to become a paying subscriber once the free year has expired.
Neil Lewis had a front-page story in The New York Times Thursday where he alleged that the political appointees at the Justice Department hate black people and only care about conservative Christians. What’s more, they’re hiring Christians from law schools that good secular people don’t go to. And the worst thing is that the political and policy folks appointed by the president to direct the agency are in fact doing so in a manner different than the Times would like.
I’m not terribly clear on why the federal government has a surgeon general, but it’s been one of the highest-ranked public health positions in the land since Ulysses S. Grant filled it with John Maynard Woodworth in 1871. President Bush’s nominee for the vacant seat is one Dr. James W. Holsinger, a University of Kentucky professor.
And then there was the funeral, with flowers, politicos, hymns, memories, televangelists and that final ironic detail — a potential whiff of napalm as a Liberty University student prepared a few makeshift bombs to drive away the right, right, right fundamentalists who planned to protest the work of that infamous liberal and sell-out Jerry Fallwell.
Both Time and Newsweek have chosen to bid farewell to Jerry Falwell with one-page essays on whether Falwell’s death also means trouble for the political involvement of conservative evangelicals in politics.
