From the Raleigh News & Observer article about the arrest of Daniel Boyd, his two sons, and four other men in North Carolina on terrorism charges:
"If he's a terrorist, he's the nicest terrorist I've ever met in my life," said Charles Casale, a neighbor to Boyd and his sons who often chatted with them.
Meet North Carolina's Daniel Patrick Boyd. Vocation: drywaller. Avocation: aspiring international jihadist.
Looking over this guy's history, who could have guessed that his offspring would also turn out to be certifiable?
--Michelle Cottle
Last night I noted, with regard to Jonah Goldberg's erroneous beliefs that the stimulus did not include tax cuts and that liberals did not complain about its size at the time of its passage, that it's very frustrating to debate public policy with people who are unaware of the basic facts. The problem seems to be especially acute on health care, an issue conservatives have just never paid much attention to.
Last week, an all-out rumble erupted in South Korea's National Assembly as a bill to privatize the media passed through the legislature. But this isn't the first time punches have been thrown and hair has been pulled on the floors of parliament. For your enjoyment, we've put together a compilation of the absolute ugliest brawls. Look out for the Phone Defensive, the Dais Dive, and the People's Elbow.
--Ben Eisler
Check out the latest on TNRtv:
The title of The Ugly Truth echoes that of The Awful Truth, the 1937 Cary Grant-Irene Dunne battle-of-the-sexes film that essentially invented the comic-romantic persona that Grant would wear with such panache for the duration of his career. But the movie's true forbear is When Harry Met Sally, which it apes both in broad contour--here, again, a crass Lothario (Gerard Butler) tries to teach an uptight control-freak (Katherine Heigl) that all men are sex-obsessed pigs--and in a variety of particulars.
The exhilirating mass protests and shocking acts of public brutality have ended, and so media interest in Iran is down substantially. But the crackdown clearly didn't snuff out the opposition and with every day comes new word that the highest levels of the regime are roiling. Ahmadinejad is under pressure from both reformers and now conservatives angry over some of his recent personnel moves.
Aluf Benn in the NYT and Bradley Burston in Haaretz both urge Obama to make a speech to the Israeli people, akin to the one he made in Cairo to Muslims. On one level, Obama's failure to do this with Israelis makes sense.
Despite my honest efforts to avoid watching or reading about--much less commenting on--reality TV, the very concept underlying some offerings is too troubling to ignore. Several years back, in the more innocent days of the genre, "Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire" fell into this category for me. What could be more culturally corrosive, I wrote, than a show specifically geared to perpetuate the stereotype of women as self-abasing, cat-fighting gold-diggers? (Oh, how naive was I.)
The debate over re-regulation of the financial sector has finally, and irreversibly, turned partisan. This helps define issues in ways that may be more familiar and thus easier to understand.
My Inbox reports:
Media Advisory
Renowned writer/director Nora Ephron will donate objects from the set of her latest Columbia Pictures film “Julie & Julia” to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The motion picture is based in part on famed chef Julia Child’s life and features a reproduction of her kitchen, which is on display at the museum.
