This is the cover of the New Yorker for the issue dated July 21, 2008.
Barack Obama, it has been reported, has no comment. David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, says it’s a satire so can everyone please grope their elbows and find their funny bones. John McCain’s spokesman has said the cover is “tasteless […]
British Conservative politician Norman Tebbit was famous for his Tebbit test, the idea that no one who rooted for (say) the Indian or Pakistani cricket team could be considered a British patriot. Of course, it was meant to apply to desis and blacks and not the Scots or Irish. Tebbit’s small-minded ‘test’ was seen as […]
Hindu Temple Society president Uma Mysorekar bravely went on the Colbert Report last night to defend Hinduism. The shtick was that since Barack Obama left Jeremiah Wright’s church, Colbert will help him shop for another.
Mysorekar claimed that neither is Diwali over-commercialized, not does being Hindu involve guilt or sin. Methinks auntieji is fudging a bit […]
A story in Details, of all places, goes further than any other MSM piece I’ve seen in probing Jindal’s desiness. It paints him to be a hard-driving morph whose religious conversion was inspired by a girl he had the hots for:
“I considered myself anti-Christian,” he wrote in another piece; elsewhere, he confided that he thought […]
A Boston Globe warhorse drew an interesting analogy today between a possible McCain-Jindal ticket and Eisenhower-Nixon. Jindal is 36, Richard Nixon was 39:
For a running mate Ike chose the young senator from California, Richard Nixon, who, at 39, provided a generational counterweight and also a salve to conservatives. George H.W. Bush was 64 when he […]
Memorial Day parade, Cambridge
Today, Memorial Day, was originally established to honor Union soldiers fighting to abolish the kidnapping, sale and enslavement of Africans and preserve the united state. It’s the first Memorial Day in the history of America that a minority stands a good chance of becoming president.
So it was quite unusual last week when […]
Is America ready to elect a president who looks like a Secret Service agent and admits to reading foreign policy tomes? I see a cabinet post in Fareed Zakaria’s future. (The book is Zakaria’s latest, The Post-American World, hat tip: Ennis.)
I read the beginning of Preeta Samarasan’s Evening Is the Whole Day, skimmed the rest, and quickly realized this is not my kind of fiction — deliberately-paced, for the most part microscopically focused, more earnest than funny. Predictably, the parts I liked best were the historical passages about how the Tamil family’s patriarch got his […]
A couple of months ago, John McCain criticized Barack Obama for saying he’d launch surgical airstrikes against terrorists in Pakistan — when Dubya does so every other week. The GOP line then was that Obama was too aggressive with terrorists.
Yesterday in Israel, Dubya tried to link Obama’s willingness to talk to enemy nations to Neville […]
West Virginia voters say why they voted in overwhelming numbers for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama (at 1:45):
I guess because he is another race. I’m sort of scared of the other race ’cause we have so much conflict with ‘em…
He’s Muslim, and that has a lot to do with it…
I don’t like the […]
Kamala Harris, mother Shyamala, sister Maya
San Francisco DA Kamala Harris was on CNN tonight spinning the primaries for Barack Obama. Harris endorsed Obama in January:
I rarely read Bill Kristol, a reliable reciter of GOP talking points. He’s what in radio terms one would dismiss as a repeater, someone who retransmits a signal handed down from party mandarins.
But his position as a propaganda tool is precisely what makes his latest trial balloon intriguing:
… if we run a traditional campaign; our […]
Taint
In the best of times, South Asia rarely gets interjected in presidential debates. Pakistan gets all the attention because its border is teeming with Al Qaeda and its leaders come with hands outstretched. China gets vaguely mentioned as an economic threat, and sometimes India alongside, the new hyphenated relationship.
So when a presidential debate comes off […]
Pope Ratzinger, the most powerfully regressive voice on contraception and religions other than Catholicism, got front-page treatment today:
Meanwhile, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton attended an event called the Faith Forum, fumbling around in public about their love for an incarnation. Get a pew, you two.
And India is worse. This is a country where gurus […]
Badmash’s latest animated parody agrees that Obama’s race speech was stuck in an old black-or-white frame:
Watch here.
Previously: Jooma chumma de de, Amitabh vs. O’Baba
Wreath marks the spot
On this day, the 40th anniversary of MLK’s assassination:
King’s last words on the balcony were to musician Ben Branch… who was scheduled to perform that night… “Ben, make sure you play ‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord’ in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty.” [Link]
Gandhi’s memorial (or Samadhi) at Raj Ghat, […]
by Ray Noland
Barack Obama’s Great Race Speech yesterday drew plenty of frothy praise and historians’ plaudits. But it was a disappointingly limited speech, projecting a static, black-and-white image of America which has little to do with its real racial makeup today.
Keep in mind that all Obama had to do was walk in, denounce Rev. Jeremiah […]
Moving away from the subject of Iraq, Barack Obama spoke on national security today, calling for a major change in Pakistan and Afghanistan policy and slamming the diversion in the sands of Iraq. He wants to get rid of Musharraf, make Pakistan aid conditional on fighting jihadis and restoring democracy, boost non-military aid, and continue […]
John McCain has made much hay of his foreign policy experience, but today he made the elementary mistake of mixing up Sunni groups with Shia:
Speaking to reporters in Amman… McCain said he… [was] concerned about Iranian operatives “taking al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back”… Sen. Joseph Lieberman… stepped forward and whispered in […]
Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro
The NYT has a great story out about Barack Obama’s mother, née Ann Dunham, who was born in Kansas and worked at several NGOs, including one in Pakistan. It struck me that the central conflict in her second marriage is similar to that of The Konkans:
Her second marriage faded, too, in the […]