An otherwise charming Pat Healy piece on Palin’s rhetorical style and campaign gets a little detail wrong: “Man, I love small-town U.S.A.,” Ms. Palin told several thousand people on a field in Ohio, “and I don’t care what anyone else says about small-town U.S.A. You guys, you just get it.” Ms. Palin did not identify […]

The constraints that come along with writing for an excellent newspaper, like The New York Times, often cut down on the wry jokes reporters, like Elizabeth Bumiller, can make. But this juxtaposition has got to be intentional, no? “The next president won’t have time to get used to the office,” Mr. McCain said, with his […]

I just put up a piece that criticizes Howard Kurtz (and others) for not giving the straight dope on the true findings of the Alaska legislative report on the Palins’ efforts to have their ex-brother-in-law fired from the state trooper force. In my article, I note that Kurtz was kind enough to mention my story […]

But on Sunday, and since, journalists let her off the hook

Palin isn’t the only politician from the north side of the the 49th parallel having trouble in TV interviews. Here’s an awkward video of a CTV interview with Stephane Dion, leader of the opposition Liberal Party, where he grows flustered and asks for several do-overs to what seems like a simple question on the economy. […]

Hard questions, second guesses, and conflict up North

I had it in mind to write something about this McCain quote from today: “Look, we don’t care about an old washed-up terrorist and his wife, who still, at least on Sept. 11, 2001, said he still wanted to bomb more. That’s not the point here. The point is Sen. Obama said he was just […]

Norm Coleman is not platform agnostic

New York Times columnist Bill Kristol gets a Palin interview before any of his colleagues on the, you know, news side of the paper. What a scoopmeister! Towards the end of the column, after Kristol notes that Palin has recently begun to raise the (non)-issue of Bill Ayres comes this exchange: I pointed out that […]

Palin really appreciates having the ability to speak with people “without the filter of the mainstream media telling viewers what they’ve just heard.” So I guess Palin would like you all to turn off your televisions before the post-shows start. Not a terrible idea.