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In the aftermath of GOP presidential candidate John McCain’s statement that he is a Baptist and not an Episcopalian, the Associated Press followed up and did something of a clarification story by getting some more comments from the always-media-accessible Arizona politician:
My first reaction, when I read the bold Washington Post headline, was negative. I am not fond of religious labels, but this looked like a futile attempt to avoid one. It said: “Anti-Syrian Lawmaker Killed in Beirut Blast.”
This week brings two online discussions of the book God’s Harvard by Washington Post Style reporter Hanna Rosin. One discussion, on the Post‘s website, features questions from readers, with fairly predictable results. It’s a funny mix of Patrick Henry College alumni and people who are frightened by them.
In many ways, the news coverage of GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee reminds me of the type that would be given to a city’s new young, hip youth pastor. He’s got all the right moves, says all the right things, draws praise from nearly everyone, including his opponents, and — guess what? — he strums the guitar. One more thing: he’s got a great personal story of losing nearly enough weight to make up another person.
I made it to Prague just fine, with no help from the construction war zone that is called Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport. You don’t want to know about it. OK, let’s just say that airport terminals designed to be linked by trains do not work well when there are no trains.
Tucked away in the middle of The Washington Post Saturday was an extensively reported story about how recent Islamic converts were key players in recently foiled terrorist attacks in Germany. The story starts on the front end discussing what “counterterrorism officials and analysts” are saying and follows up on the back end with a rebuttal of sorts from religious leaders in Germany’s Muslim community. For one reason or another I get the sense that those reporting this story spent less time in the mosques and more time on the phone with law enforcement and public safety officials and thinkers who watch things like this:
The Associated Press broke a story ab0ut presidential candidate John McCain’s statement this past weekend that he is in fact a Baptist, despite his past comments that he is an Episcopalian. The news hook is that McCain made these comments while he was in South Carolina, which happens to have a lot of Baptist voters.
In the Sept. 10 edition of The New Republic, Bruce Bartlett complains about the response to his pointing out that Scientologists once led the fight for replacing all income taxes with a national retail sales tax:
Maybe it’s appropriate to write about this on the morning of Sept. 11. How different would things be today if the terrorist attacks of six years ago had never happened?
