Doddering Reaganite Peggy Noonan has become the conservative version of Richard Cohen: a doddering old columnist employed by a respected journalistic institution who uses their column space to demand less journalism and more government secrecy. Have you heard of these so-called "leaks," from our leaders? The United States government is not a house of plumbing, sir. Sir? Sir.
Behold the first election-year bombshell: Barack Obama's White House will announce this morning that it will unilaterally begin granting work permits to as many as 800,000 illegal immigrants who arrived in the United States as children, graduated from high school, and stayed out of trouble with the law. He's essentially implemented the much-debated DREAM Act, only without the hassle of all that voting in Congress. He should have done this with health care!
America is in the midst of a student loan bubble. College costs are increasing, student debt is increasing, job prospects are far from assured, and loan delinquency is on the rise. It's a big problem. The best idea for a solution that I've heard in a long time: let people buy into college students. Like little indentured servants, but not really!
There should be a name for the kind of crisis that occurs between the status-anxious quarter-life type and the desperately youth-reclaiming midlife variety. That male, mid-30's freak out that masquerades as a nonstop party is an Atlantic trend piece waiting to happen, full of quotes from single-ish men who are too immature to know better or men that do know better and consciously flaunt their remaining immaturity.
Even though Lindsay Lohan is currently shooting both Liz and Dick and Lady In A Porsche Smushed Against An 18-Wheeler simultaneously, novelist Bret Easton Ellis announced last night that she has also won a part in the forthcoming film he wrote The Canyons, which is not a about large chasms in the earth created by running water. Lohan will star with America's current male porn person of note, James Deen, and be required to do things and have things done to her simulating real live humping, like this, says the The Daily Mail:
GMA co-host Robin Roberts announced on the show this morning that she has been diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome. Roberts explained that she will begin chemotherapy for MDS, a disease of the blood and bone marrow, today. She was diagnosed with the rare disease on the same day as the much-scrutinized Obama same-sex marriage interview.
On Tuesday night, MSNBC sent Ed Schultz to cover the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election on the ground. Maybe the fact that he was on the radio in the Dakotas was "close enough." Maybe he volunteered. Maybe if you squint he sort of looks like a sausage in a JoS. A. Bank casing.
Everything old is new again: A tipster has emailed Gawker claiming to have hacked into Mitt Romney's private email and DropBox accounts.
When the New York Times published a detailed story by chief Washington correspondent David Sanger today confirming the U.S. as the co-author of the Stuxnet virus and outlining Barack Obama's role in directing a highly classified digital monkeywrenching program against Iranian nuclear facilities, many observers noted that the story couldn't have been written without White House support. Which is odd, considering how much energy the White House has been putting into prosecuting leaks it doesn't like.
Vindictive troll Roger Ailes, who—when he's not busy using corporate security to tail his employees, calling local cops to fish his keys out of his locked car, or overseeing the production of political attack ads disguised as news programming—owns a pair of small-town newspapers in rural Putnam County, N.Y., is an absolute master at real-time reflexive paranoid hysteria. For instance, if you write things about those small-town papers that he doesn't like, he will go through the subscriber rolls, find your name, and cancel your subscription. Attention to detail!
KFC announced this week it will make a never-before-seen autobiography and cookbook written by Colonel Sanders available for download on its Facebook page starting June 4th. Interestingly, as Smithsonian Magazine’s Food & Think blog noted last month, there was pretty much nothing Colonel Sanders hated more than Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Megalomaniacal supervillain Jim VandeHei and emotionally hobbled robo-reporter Mike Allen, both of Politico, have penned a rugged endorsement of Mitt Romney's chief grievance today, agreeing with his advisors that the press corps is busy "scaring up stories to undermine the introduction of Mitt Romney to the general election audience." We need more serious, measured, balanced, non-inflammatory reporting on both candidates, said the men responsible for Politico, a web site that catalogs what political flacks' "dietary dossiers."
