It's a grand but unspoken Hollywood tradition: the child star grows up and becomes sexualized.… Read full post »

Maybe President Obama needs an Image Czar, not merely in the sense of someone qualified to create and manage photo opportunities but someone who would have nixed the ill-considered Air Force One debacle on Monday morning.

The latest government official with egg on his face is Louis E. Calder… Read full post »

photo credits: upper left and right, Paul J. Rrichards/Agence France-Presse; lower left, J. Scott Applewhite/The Associated Press; lower right, AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

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“The man beholdeth himself in the glass and goeth his way, and straightway both the mirror and the mirrored forget wh… Read full post »

Photo: Pete Souza/The White House

Well, actually it was more of a skirmish. On Wednesday, the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse refused to distribute images provided by the White House of the President’s activities in the Oval Office during his first full day in office,… Read full post »

10:52 a.m.
I’m at our table in Carolines with my wife Dee (aka Girl w/Pen) and a happy, mimosa-fueled crowd of feminist confreres watching as the bi-Presidential caravan heads out from the White House. (This is unfortunately taking the form of an after-the-fact dispatch, since I don’t have… Read full post »

 

THIS is what confronted me this morning in a little camera store Times Square, NYC on my way to the White House Project's  Inauguration Watch Party at Carolines' Comedy Club. What happened to the sprawling Times Square newstands selling everything from comics to cigars to, well, I… Read full post »

Picture courtesy First People

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Since the Obama Administration will stand for change, they should signal this message through their choice of White House pup. I think they should adopt an Alaskan wolf pup orphaned by one of Governor Palin's sniper copters. Too much for Sasha and…

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Wednesday, November 5th, 2008. I woke up this morning and decided I wanted to wear a flag pin, for the firs… Read full post »

                                      

As of this morning, Joe the Plumber is a brand as well as a hou… Read full post »

                                         

 

For a long moment she didn’t reac… Read full post »

 

Top: the Obama family, barackobama.com October 3, 2008
Bottom: The First Family, Hyannisport, MA, August 4, 1962

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A few days ago I was in full ADD mode, surfing the web and breezing through my usual site-haunts, when I decided to take a detour to Obama's website…

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The best thing about being newly single back in 2006, believe it or not, was finally having a library. It seemed that no matter how large our series of outer-borough NYC apartments were, living with my ex meant the floor plan never allowed for all of my books being in… Read full post »

             

This is the first in a series of  posts taking a look at Depression Era culture of the past, and speculating on the Shape of Things to Come. What can we salvage from the past to survive? What are the implicati… Read full post »

"Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it. You know, I just do things."

                      &n… Read full post »

Oy, this feels like scrambling for seats on High Holy Days, but here goes: are there any NY OSers out there hosting debate watching parties on Friday night with a spare seat or two? In these fraught times, the prospect of watching a white knuckle event like the debates… Read full post »

 

   

 A quick post, for a simple comparison. As reported today by Blake Mitchell, prominent Clinton backer Lynn Forester de Rothschild has come out in support of the McCain ticket because she thinks Obama is "an elitist". Well, I suppose some neighbors of Obama… Read full post »

Ever since first hearing of Lehman Brothers' impending doom Sunday night, all I've been able to think about are those enormous screens wrapped around their headquarters on upper Times Square. Have they gone dark? Are they running giant personal farewells from the… Read full post »

The McCain/Palin spin machine has reached has reached dizzying momentum in these last few days. Palin shape-shifts now at an alarming rate, going from pit bull to pig, to now, apparently, Little Red Riding Hood. As can be seen in the graphic above, embedded in an email sent… Read full post »

  

It hit me like a flash when I saw the news item on the new Sarah Palin action figures. This whole scenario—the heretofore unknown candidate showing up out of nowhere to dominate a long-running campaign overnight— is new to American politics, unpredictable and highly d… Read full post »

The big news across the right-wing blogosphere this last Saturday was about how John McCain adopted the 12,000 American flags orphaned by Godless Democrats after the pagan orgy of Barack Obama's acceptance speech on Invesco Field. The facts around the situation are a bit muddled, but the narrative ru… Read full post »

Actually, there are a few more goodies thrown in the mix: two soft drinks, a long-winded awards show and a national institute (hint: it's a distant relative of the awards show). Answers below.

Bad timing can sometimes just not be helped. I am away at a… Read full post »

An essential ingredient of the McCain spin machine has been to paint Barack Obama as Other, alien, oddball, and in a close corollary, arrogant in his presumptions — David Gergen for one has called their bluff and claims that McCain is using code for "uppity," specifically in his… Read full post »