“Tell me,” says Joel.
“I can’t,” I say.
“Then why did you almost tell me?” Joel yells.
“Because I wasn’t thinking responsibly!” I yell. “I was swept up in the magic of the moment.”
In her widely watched Oprah appearance, for example, Palin said that she resented people questioning her ability to serve as vice-president while being a mother to five children – something a man would never be asked. But Palin also complained that in her interview with Couric, she thought she would be speaking to the reporter “working mom [to] working mom” and that she was annoyed with “her badgering and questions”.
In other words, Palin thought that because Couric was a woman, she wouldn’t take her job as a journalist seriously. Palin expected a puff piece instead of pesky questions about economics, abortion and Palin’s policies – you know, things a “working mom” couldn’t possibly be bothered with.
…
When the magazine ran an extreme close-up picture of the former governor last year, conservatives criticised the publication for not airbrushing out Palin’s flaws. Newsweek pointed out that Photoshopping pictures are for fashion spreads, not political cover stories, and that the picture represented the candidate as she was. And this presents the general problem with Palin today – she’s upset that people won’t airbrush away who she really is, and that no one believes her when she tries to do the same.
The sun rises at Porthcawl harbour in South Wales, above a dramatic scene of crashing waves. | BBC
A sommelier pours wine at an open-air wine spa in the town of Hakone, in Kanagawa prefecture, Japan. | BBC
My favorite thing about this picture is the disembodied, wine-pouring arm.
Critics storm that health care reform is “a cruel hoax and a delusion.” Ads in 100 newspapers thunder that reform would mean “the beginning of socialized medicine.”
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page predicts that the legislation will lead to “deteriorating service.” Business groups warn that Washington bureaucrats will invade “the privacy of the examination room,” that we are on the road to rationed care and that patients will lose the “freedom to choose their own doctor.”
All dire — but also wrong. Those forecasts date not from this year, but from the battle over Medicare in the early 1960s. I pulled them from newspaper archives and other accounts.
Chongqing, China: Taxis queue up to get their fuel tanks filled with liquid gas. There has been a shortage of gas due to severe cold weather in parts of the country | AFP /Getty Images
I’m getting flashbacks to when Jim worked for Capital One.
