I kid, but this is terrible: Someone has intentionally applied lethal amounts of herbicide to the soil around the famous Toomer’s Corner oaks on the campus of Auburn University, university officials said Wednesday. They say there is little chance they can save the trees, which are an icon of the campus. HROOM, HOOM!!! As B. Minich tweets, “That’s horrible. Where… Read more »
George H.W. Bush got the Presidential Medal of Freedom yesterday. Here he is, from the official White House Flickr account, meeting beforehand with Obama in the Oval Office: I’ll always have a soft spot for 41, who, as vice president, wrote (or at least signed…or had somebody stamp his signature on…shh, don’t shatter my childhood delusions) a letter to me… Read more »
In case you missed it — and if your silly belief in “American Exceptionalism” extends to gridron football, and you’re bored by the most-played and most-watched sport on Earth, then you did — Wayne Rooney scored on an instant-classic bicycle kick in the 78th minute of Manchester United’s 2-1 “Manchester Derby” victory Saturday over rival Manchester City. It’s already being… Read more »
Andrew Sullivan is finally back to blogging after a long health hiatus that stretched back to before the State of the Union address. I’ve been wondering, ever since the SOTU, whether Sullivan would share my disgust at Obama’s abject failure to pivot toward fiscal responsibility in a serious way. I expected that he would. And boy, was I ever right:… Read more »
I offer this not because of the political message, but simply because the late, great Carl Sagan — and wow, has it really been 14-plus years since he died? — rocks:
“Mitch Daniels: serious, adult, not a wingnut, and articulating a lot of conservatism’s good ideas without a lot of its bulls**t. PLEASE RUN.” –me, on Twitter tonight I wish I’d paid more attention to Governor Mitch Daniels when I was living in Indiana during my time at Notre Dame, but I didn’t really care much about state politics because I… Read more »
We can remove the question mark now. The people have spoken, the dictator has (finally) heard them, and Hosni Mubarak has stepped down after three decades as Egypt’s ruler. What happens next? A true move toward some form of democracy, or Military Dictatorship II: Egyptian Boogaloo? Who the hell knows? For now, the protesters are jubilant. I heard a correspondent… Read more »
[UPDATE: Denver wins by a shockingly lopsided margin, 69-42. Wow! See my live tweets. And here are game stories by the Denver Post, the Sun-Sentinel and the AP.] Kyle Whelliston’s Mid-Majority — the web’s premier resource for mid-major basketball coupled with random philosophical asides, 1980s references, Super Bowl information-avoidance contests, Tom Petty music, and redheads — has named tonight’s Denver-Florida… Read more »
The Wall Street Journal‘s David Wessel looks ahead to Obama’s budget, due Monday, and what it may signify about his approach to the looming debt crisis. (You may recall that I blasted Obama after his State of the Union for timidity vis a vis the debt.) Wessel writes that “when Barack Obama’s budget arrives on Monday, the thoughtful will look… Read more »
It snowed again Monday night and Tuesday, and the wind blew a good bit of the white stuff onto our covered front porch, resulting in this pretty scene: