VA-04 - Forbes: "I won't debate." LeGrow: "No problem."

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Tuesday October 12, 2010 · 2:27 PM PDT

2010/10/12 · 14:27

The following is text from a press release that we at the Wynne LeGrow campaign have just sent out to every major media outlet in Virginia as well as to the campaign office of Randy Forbes.

barrettbrown

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Thursday October 07, 2010 · 7:43 PM PDT

2010/10/07 · 19:43

A few days ago I was contacted by Adam Chadwick, a former copyeditor for the New York Times who's currently filming a feature-length documentary on "the decline of the traditional newspaper business" and what this development portends for journalists and news consumers alike. Chadwick was particularly interested in the question of whether investigative journalism in particular can continue to thrive in an era of weakened newspapers. I suggested he get in touch with Allison Kilkenny.

barrettbrown

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Wednesday October 06, 2010 · 2:12 PM PDT

2010/10/06 · 14:12

Last year, President Obama travelled to Turkey in order to restate America’s case to the Muslim world, taking care to emphasize that the United States is “not a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation,” but rather a republic “bound by ideals and a set of values.” Such an assertion would not have been controversial among our Founding Fathers, who made their intent clear not only in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment but also in their private letters to one another. Nonetheless, there are a great many officeholders today who reject the demonstrable evidence of a secular republic in favor of the convenient myth of a Judeo-Christian enterprise, and Representative Randy Forbes is among their most effective leaders - and all the more effective for having managed to operate largely under the radar for nearly a decade.

barrettbrown

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Saturday October 02, 2010 · 2:11 PM PDT

2010/10/02 · 14:11

It is a fine thing to see Rick Sanchez stripped of his CNN program and otherwise thrown out of the community of "respectable" pundits; it would have been an ever finer thing to have seen this happen as a result of the inane and mediocre manner in which he has gone about doing a job that, done well, could have had some positive impact on the public understanding. The confused array of assertions that Sanchez lately made to radio host is merely a symptom of a more general degree of incompetence that has long been evident to any reasonable person who has seen him in action. But CNN is disinclined to reward competence or punish incompetence. From a business standpoint, this is just as well; the network's target demographic is largely incapable of distinguishing between the two anyway.

barrettbrown

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Friday October 01, 2010 · 1:44 PM PDT

2010/10/01 · 13:44

Washington Post columnist and Pulitzer prize winner Charles Krauthammer has a new column out today in which he provides readers with his presumably expert take on the matter of Obama's decision to increase U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan by 30,000 soldiers while also having announced a force reduction to begin a year and a half afterwards. Noting further that Bob Woodward's latest book confirms that Obama has meanwhile been seeking some sort of exit strategy, Krauthammer draws a number of conclusions about why Obama is doing such things and what the result will be for Afghanistan.

"He was looking for choices that would limit U.S. involvement and provide a way out," writes Woodward. One can only conclude that Obama now thinks Afghanistan is a mistake. Maybe he thought so from the very beginning. More charitably and more likely, he is simply a foreign policy novice who didn't understand what this war was about until being given the authority and duty to conduct it -- and then decided it was all a mistake.

barrettbrown

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Tuesday September 14, 2010 · 10:45 AM PDT

2010/09/14 · 10:45

It's difficult to know where to begin here, or even to be sure that there is any such thing as a beginning in this case; more to the point, this whole affair, this day itself, may very well constitute some teleological attractor towards which all events have been flowing, having themselves been put into motion by some prankster deity in order that the universe might justify its existence and even reveal its ultimate purpose by placing Christine O'Donnell into a contentious primary fight and thereby prompting the typhoon struggle which I shall describe for you just as soon as I am done writing this sentence, which, I can assure you, is almost over.

barrettbrown

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Friday September 10, 2010 · 12:47 PM PDT

2010/09/10 · 12:47

I felt left out of all the religious persecution so I got me a Bible and I burned it, ah tell you what!

barrettbrown

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Saturday August 21, 2010 · 12:04 PM PDT

2010/08/21 · 12:04

In the interest of full disclosure I should note that I am a conspiracy theorist insomuch as that I theorize that two or more individuals will sometimes conspire to do something in secret. I am also a columnist for the venerable old Skeptical Inquirer and an occasional contributor to Skeptic. Some would find this ironic. Life is full of ironies for the stupid, as P.J. O'Rourke noted back when he was still worth reading.

barrettbrown

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Tuesday July 27, 2010 · 8:33 AM PDT

2010/07/27 · 08:33

On July 31st of 2009, three American activists were detained near the Iran/Iraq border by Iranian forces while on a hiking trip through Iraqi Kurdistan. Iran claims to have picked the three Berkley grads on its own side of the border, while The Nation - not in the habit of intentionally whipping up anti-Iranian fervor, and holding an impressive track record of accuracy for an American magazine of political commentary - now reports that witnesses from a nearby village claim to have seen the three hikers being arrested on the Iraqi side of the border.

barrettbrown

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Sunday July 18, 2010 · 6:30 PM PDT

2010/07/18 · 18:30

The Weekly Standard has long served as a showcase for our republic's more interesting commentators, not the least of which is the magazine's own founder and editor William Kristol, who is superbly interesting insomuch as that his notorious track record of failure has left him rewarded with columns in both Time and The New York Times, which is itself a very interesting thing insomuch as that it provides us with evidence that our nation is in the habit of blinding itself at the very time when clarity is most needed, and of course there is nothing more interesting than the prospect of a republic destroying itself from within.

barrettbrown

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Friday July 16, 2010 · 11:56 AM PDT

2010/07/16 · 11:56

Tyler, Texas is in many ways the exact opposite of New York, for better or worse or both. The best coffee in Tyler is found at Jack-in-the-Box, as I finally discovered after hours of aimless marching - a practice which is frowned upon here, apparently. Traversing a cross-walk during one of many coffee-getting expeditions, I was nearly run down by a woman who really, really wanted to make a right-hand turn but whose plans were being stymied by my own entirely legitimate and fait accompli crossing-the-street agenda. After nearly hitting me, she honked and sped off. Not having a cup of coffee to throw at her car, I simply gave her the finger. This is something I never had occasion to do in four years of living in New York - the capital of Unreal America, devoid as it is of Wal-Marts, meth, and federal farm subsidies.

barrettbrown

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Thursday June 24, 2010 · 12:14 PM PDT

2010/06/24 · 12:14

I've got a piece up atVanity Fair refuting the "case" against Michael Hastings, the unusually capable journalist who broke the McChrystal story. An excerpt:

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I Burned a Bible

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The Weekly Standard and Anti-Semitism

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My Vanity Fair piece on Michael Hastings, real journalist