Frist Fence Flakeout?
Some conspiratorial speculation.
The lost pixel trail: As long as he's moving mountains in the publishing world--getting his new book pulped and redone after a nightmarish printing snafu **--Andrew Sullivan may as well get to work on his archives. What's billed as the "complete archives" on his site goes back only to January of this year, as far as I can see. Where's the rest? How are we going to attack him for his embarrassing, excitable high-horse misjudgments if we can't go back and Control-C them?***... P.S.: True, that hasn't stopped Instapundit. ... Update: Or Frank Rich, apparently. Sullivan, answering Rich, says his blog posts on the immediate aftermath of the Iraq invasion are "unfindable, since my old archives are still being transferred to Time's server." How long does that take? ...
**--A prize to the first reviewer who takes the obvious cheap shot. ("The pulped version was better!") ....
***--I wound up unpublishing a few years of blog archives when I moved to Slate, including some (involving 9/11 and Thanksgiving) that were highly convenient to lose. All the pre-Slate kausfiles archives that were ever on the Web are available at the bottom of this page. .. 8:35 P.M.
The L.A. party was unexpectedly good too! 8:25 P.M.
'Stone Age' Mystery Solved? Hassan Abbas, a guest on Warren Olney's To the Point radio show ** on Friday, claimed to have resolved the mystery of whether U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had in fact threatened to bomb Pakistan "to the Stone Age" in a meeting with Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, an aide to Pakistan's President Musharraf. According to Abbas, Armitage said the U.S. might bomb Afghanistan back to the Stone Age, not Pakistan. But Ahmed interpreted it as a veiled threat to bomb Pakistan too, and reported as much to Musharraf. ... Seems plausible enough, and it reconciles everyone's stories! Plus Abbas seemed to say he reported his version in his book, Pakistan's Drift Into Extremism, published well before Musharraf's recent newsmaking revelation. ...
Saturday, September 23, 2006
9/11 rescuers Chuck Sereika and Marine Staff Sgt. Dave Karnes, "appalled" at the inaccuracies in Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, are planning to write a book (along with another 9/11 hero, New York City firefighter Tommy Asher), according to Greg Robin's thorough report in Hometown News. They blame a "rift" with rescued Officer Will Jimeno, one of the central characters in the film-- as well as rivalry between the NYC Fire Dept. and the Port Authority police.
"I figured that America deserves to know the truth about that day," Mr. Sereika said. "They certainly didn't get it from Oliver Stone."
See here for my take and here for Rebecca Liss'. As noted, the producers of the film didn't alter reality to tell a better story. They altered it to tell a worse story! But a story that apparently pleased key constituencies. ... 12:50 A.M. link
Friday, September 22, 2006
From reader J:
Who knew that the Times would go after you fence-firsters with pathos laden pictures of over-ripe pears. They play dirty.
Oxford Town, Red Hook, and Every Other Place Bob Dylan’s Ever Sung About, Mapped
This Is a Blog Post. It Is Not a “Blog.”
Teenagers Hate Facebook, but They're Not Logging Off
Photograph of Ann Coulter on Slate's home page by Brad Barket/Getty.