Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.
It broke my hillbilly heart to learn that country music crooners Brooks & Dunn announced on their website yesterday that, after 20 years, they're hanging up their spurs.
Is their music cutting edge? Nah. Alt country? Nope. They are as mainstream as modern country gets, but they produced some damn catchy tunes and had an impressive run. As noted on Wikipedia:
Not that it should surprise anyone--disgust, yes; surprise, no--but the Fox network has bought footage of Nadya Sulman and her brood and scheduled a two-hour primetime special on the happy family to air August 19: "Octomom: The Incredible Unseen Footage."
Subtle.
Here's my favorite part: According to the AP report, "Last month, a California judge appointed a lawyer to oversee the estate of the octuplets, saying he wanted to make sure they weren't exploited by paid ventures like reality shows."
Tonight, our very own Jonathan Cohn will talk health care reform with the sexiest fake conservative on television, Stephen Colbert. It’ll be more informative, more entertaining, and less creepy than any town hall meeting in the land. So, be sure to tune in to “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central at 11:30 p.m.--and don’t forget to prep yourself by watching our other Jonathan’s performance on the show from several months back.
Sometimes, a film defies conventional narrative and artistic standards so utterly that it seems unfair to judge it by them. G.I. Joe is such a case, a movie that has, through its own inverse accomplishment, earned the right to speak for itself. I've let it do just that here.
--Christopher Orr
One interesting wrinkle in the story of Baitullah Mehsud's assassination-by-drone is that Mehsud has long been a higher-priority target for Pakistan's president, Asif Ali Zardari, than he has been for the United States. This may have been for personal reasons.
From Quentin Tarantino's interview with Jeffrey Goldberg:
“Holocaust movies always have Jews as victims,” he said, plainly exasperated by Hollywood’s lack of imagination. “We’ve seen that story before. I want to see something different. Let’s see Germans that are scared of Jews. Let’s not have everything build up to a big misery, let’s actually take the fun of action-movie cinema and apply it to this situation.”
--Isaac Chotiner
On MSNBC just now, Andrea Mitchell told Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell that the Obama White House is distancing itself from a USA Today editorial written by Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer arguing, in Mitchell's words, that "it's un-American to protest" Obama's health care plan at town hall meetings.
