In order to deal with the dearth of "hard" news that usually comes at the end of the year, columnists and magazines come up with gimmicks to fill space and keep readers interested. Time has the person of the year, Jeff Jacoby collects a "liberal hate speech" folder and shares the results with readers (favorite bit from this year’s column: "The St. Petersburg, Fla., Democratic Club took out an ad calling for the death of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. ‘Then there’s Rumsfeld who said of Iraq, "We have our good days and our bad days . . . We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say, "This is one of our bad days," and pull the trigger.’").
The Iraqification of Iraq
You know, apart from trifling matters such as suicide bombers, acute shortages, a plummeting U.S. dollar, and lousy troop morale, I thought the Iraq occupation/handover was going swimmingly. We had a date certain to hold elections and, after, the U.S. could make concrete plans to withdraw, and Iraqis could go about charting their own course.
The U.N. proposes, Amazon disposes
Stung by charges that the U.S. is being “stingy” with the amount of foreign aid to alleviate the suffering of the thousands of victims of the recent tsunami in the Indian Ocean, bellicose bloggers such as Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds have directed readers to a donations page at Amazon and advised them to do their worst.
Missing the point on Santorum
In the year-end Who’s Next issue, Newsweek‘s Howard Fineman floats the Senator-Rick-Santorum-for-president trial balloon.
What shark attack? The red stuff was planted by Republicans
These things used to be kind of funny (see my "mean-spirited Santa-hating liberals" entry) but I’m finally convinced that commercial and civic efforts to banish Christmas from the public square are of sufficient gravity to elevate them to a new permanent skirmish in what some call the culture wars.
The fab five and an extra band member
How we got here
Christopher Caldwell has written a cover story for the current Weekly Standard that’s a tour d’horizon of the Netherlands, a society on the verge of remaking itself in response to Theo van Gogh’s murder.
Desist and apologize for your blaspheming ways
Was I ever ahead of the curve on this one. Last October, when I was still assistant managing editor of the American Spectator, we ran a piece on the website by Kathy Shaidle (of Relapsed Catholic fame) about Irshad Manji, the Toronto-based writer who had just written the book The Trouble With Islam.
Macy's II
As we were hoping earlier, Religion News Service has deigned to cover the efforts of the Committee to Save Merry Christmas.
