I’m Not Going to Do This Every Day

This is the greatest interview Charlie Rose has ever done:

This is very nice, though I must also steer the compleatist reader to Nwk’s own steampunk piece from last October.

Dana Milbank, fine reporter turned fine columnist, has a telling bit from today’s Washington Post about the last days of W’s presidency.

The excellent Jesse Ellison has a nice interview in Nwk with the author; I loved the book, and the interview is almost as good.

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Presenting Angry Journalist.com

Why Kansas can win, and why Carolina probably will anyway

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George W. Bush gave a long speech at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base yesterday making his case, for, well, for following whatever his lead is in Iraq. On bit keeps bugging me:

As this debate unfolds, I ask people on both sides to keep an open mind, and to take a close look at the situation on the ground. Here is what one scholar and critic of the war recently wrote: “No one can spend some 10 days visiting the battlefields in Iraq without seeing major progress in every area. If the United States provides sustained support to the Iraqi government — in security, governance, and development — there is now a very real chance that Iraq will emerge as a secure and stable state.”

And….that’s it. No mention of who this “scholar and critic of the war” is. Who is this person? Fred Kaplan? I kinda doubt it’s him. Dick Cheney? Some 5th Grader in Houston? A product of the fertile mind of a Bush speechwriter? Also, no mention of whether the “critic of the war” quoted had actually been to Iraq recently, or had just been reading Bush Administration press releases.

Please, W. At least give us a little effort here…

This is the first graf of Joel Stein’s new Joe Francis profile in GQ :

The first time I wrote about Joe Francis was six years ago; I rode with him on the Girls Gone Wild tour bus, where we watched a woman spread-eagle on a bunk bed and writhe for a video crew. At one point, Francis sent me to fill a Mike’s Hard Lemonade bottle with water, which the woman poured on her breasts before shoving the bottle inside her. When the woman’s cell phone rang, Francis grabbed it and asked whose number it was, and when she said that it was her boyfriend, his eyes went manic. He flipped it open, told the guy that he was the owner of Girls Gone Wild and was enjoying watching the dude’s girlfriend use a bottle of Mike’s Hard Lemonade as a sex device. He was barely looking at the woman. Francis’s real passion is dominating other men.

And this is the opening of Claire Hoffman’s excellent LA Times piece on the same subject from 2006:

Joe Francis, the founder of the “Girls Gone Wild” empire, is humiliating me. He has my face pressed against the hood of a car, my arms twisted hard behind my back. He’s pushing himself against me, shouting: “This is what they did to me in Panama City!”

It’s after 3 a.m. and we’re in a parking lot on the outskirts of Chicago. Electronic music is buzzing from the nightclub across the street, mixing easily with the laughter of the guys who are watching this, this me-pinned-and-helpless thing.

Francis isn’t laughing.

He has turned on me, and I don’t know why. He’s going on and on about Panama City Beach, the spring break spot in northern Florida where Bay County sheriff’s deputies arrested him three years ago on charges of racketeering, drug trafficking and promoting the sexual performance of a child. As he yells, I wonder if this is a flashback, or if he’s punishing me for being the only blond in sight who’s not wearing a thong. This much is certain: He’s got at least 80 pounds on me and I’m thinking he’s about to break my left arm. My eyes start to stream tears.

More from our Nwk blog on the NCAA men’s basketball tournament

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A nice bit on Slate’s XX factor (an entirely unrelated aside: visually, ‘XX factor’ reads to me like a porn blog, or a blog about really large clothing. I know blog names are hard to come up with (see, for instance, the lame name of this site), but really, Slate, you’re being too clever by half with this one) about Mike Huckabee’s gracious response to Obama’s race speech:

On Obama’s speech:

… I think that, you know, Obama has handled this about as well as anybody could. And I agree, it’s a very historic speech. … And I thought he handled it very, very well.

And on the Rev. Wright:

… One other thing I think we’ve got to remember: As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say, “That’s a terrible statement,” I grew up in a very segregated South, and I think that you have to cut some slack. And I’m going to be probably the only conservative in America who’s going to say something like this, but I’m just telling you: We’ve got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told, “You have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus.” And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would, too. I probably would, too. In fact, I may have had a more, more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

Funny how you don’t see Mark Penn or Howard Wolfson or Hillary Clinton saying things like that.

True. Though to be fair, Mike Huckabee isn’t running against Obama, so he can afford to be gracious. Read more XX factor here.