Since many feminist commentators often note the fixation the media and popular culture has on the attire of female politicians (I plead guilty), and given the recent ad nauseam attention to Elena Kagan’s attire, physical shape, and sexuality, the Stinque Department of Lady-Bits has chosen today to focus on two male politicians and their sartorial choices. Stinque Fashionistas, join me in the critique. Read more »

“In the changing media landscape… Little Orphan Annie has run into adversity not even she could overcome. The sun will come out tomorrow, but the tomorrow after June 13 will be the first in generations to dawn without ‘Annie’ appearing in a daily newspaper.” [Chicago Tribune]

Above: The 2005 Formula One Marlboro Ferrari. Cool! Only the European Union has banned tobacco sponsorship of “cross-border cultural and sporting events.” Darn.

Below: Marlboro’s solution. What’s that? A barcode? Huh?

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It might take you a couple of reads before you realize what precisely it is that, Thomas Fuller, a New York Times reporter is describing in this paragraph:

A renegade Thai general was shot in Bangkok on Thursday as the military prepared to encircle the barricaded encampment of antigovernment protesters.

The general, Khattiya Sawatdiphol, 58, was struck in the head by a bullet during an interview with this reporter about 7 p.m. on the street in central Bangkok, near a park occupied by his hard-line followers. This reporter, who was facing the general and about two feet away, heard a loud bang not unlike a firecracker. The general fell to the ground, with his eyes wide open, and protesters took his apparently lifeless body to the hospital, screaming out his nickname.

You’d be hard pressed to find a better example of the stilted conventions of  hyper-neutral, impersonal, distanced, journalistic diction than this paragraph whose language goes a long way in obscuring the fact that what this reporter is talking about is SOME DUDE’S… FUCKIN’… HEAD EXPLODING TWO FUCKING FEET AWAY FROM ME WHILE I WAS FUCKING STANDING THERE JUST TALKING TO HIM!!!! …JESUS, FUCK, JEEEEEESUS FUCK!

You gotta wonder how many Vodka Martinis it took before Fuller was able to put pen to paper and carve out that unimpeachably grammatical,  perfectly emotionless paragraph.

“In both speeches, Palin cited President Ronald Reagan as a driving influence in her life and political career, drawing great attention to the fact Reagan was born and educated in Illinois — the state in which we believe Palin will officially launch her 2012 presidential bid on February 6th, 2011… Reagan’s 100th birthday.” [Conservatives4Palin, via Political Wire]

The summer before we entered journalism school, the dean called us freshmen in for a pep talk.

Get out, he said. Now. The future is grim. Your chance of being and remaining gainfully employed in a low-paying profession is even grimmer.

This was 1977.

CNN didn’t exist yet, never mind the Internet. The bogeymen were newspaper chains like Gannett, and they hadn’t even launched USA Today.

We, of course, ignored the dean’s advice, graduated four years later, worked at a small community newspaper for eighteen months, and decided we’d rather run away and join the circus. And here we are.

And whenever we read thumbsuckers on The Fate of Newspapers in The Internet Age, we think of the dean. Nobody in the industry should act surprised. This has been coming for a generation.

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“Eliot Spitzer, a member of Kagan’s social circle at Princeton University, wanted to make the same point as Walzer. ‘I did not go out with her, but other guys did,’ he said in an email Tuesday night.” [Politico, via Political Wire]