News and Commentary on Politics, Media and Culture

I was first introduced to the Bizarro World concept when I watched the brilliant Seinfeld episode in which Elaine stumbles across the good doppelgängers of her self-centered, fairly conscience-free group of friends (Jerry, Kramer, George and Newman).  When she describes the “good” guys to her group, Jerry says that she seems to have stumbled into [...]

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The answer to the above question: When it’s impossible to distinguish the satire from the real thing.
I received several emails today alerting me to a post at Power Line that purported to reprint a directive from a powerful person at a major media outlet, describing how to cover the upcoming Republican Convention. Here, [...]

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People joke about the fact that lawyer’s “briefs” are so long. It is a good joke, but it misses the whole point of a true legal brief, which is to consolidate vast amounts of information culled from disparate sources into a single, coherent, lucid document. It’s very difficult to do this well.
Of course, [...]

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I read an interesting pair of articles today — bookends, if you will — that discuss Obama’s increasingly tortured relationship with American Jews.
The first, by Sabrina Leigh Schaeffer, notes two things: first, Obama’s Israel-friendly rhetoric and, second, his numerous associations with people who are openly antisemitic and actively hostile to Israel. What thinking people [...]

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The media adored it when Ronald Reagan or Dan Quayle, or George Bush (actually both George Bushes) made gaffes. Whether they misspelled a word, got confused about a fact, or mispronounced something (or used a regional pronunciation, these gaffes were news.
The old media, the TV and newspapers, trumpeted the gaffes in prominent places (top [...]

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Tom Friedman, man of the New York Times, writes to assure American Jews that Obama is no threat whatsoever to Israel’s security.  His column is a nasty little piece of work, not for what it says, but for what it doesn’t say.  It opens with a series of scare quotations purported from Barack Obama, all [...]

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I recall hearing a guest on talk radio (I forget which show) saying that a recession is defined by very specific economic indicators — and that, despite the loose use of the word “recession” by uninformed media types, those economic indicators were not present. Perhaps that’s not surprising, given that the economy is growing, something [...]

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