Even for someone who specializes in consistently saying the most offensive and irrelevant things, Ann Coulter's statements about black Republicans in an interview with Sean Hannity Monday crossed the line. In a segment discussing accusations of sexual harassment against Herman Cain, Coulter and Hannity completely sidestepped the allegations and instead ranted about why liberals target African American Republicans. Of course the argument moved away from issues of sex and workplace harassment and moved on to how Barack Obama is only half-black and his father wasn't even an American.
After Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity in Washington, D.C., last year, Rachel Maddow convinced Stewart to sit down with her for over an hour to discuss politics and the media. She dedicated her entire show that night to the interview. I don't see how anyone could have come away from that interview thinking Maddow had not given serious thought to the state of the media today and her own role in it.
So you can imagine my astonishment when The New Republic listed Maddow on their list of Washington's 10 "over-rated thinkers." But sure enough, alongside Newt Gingrich and Ayn Rand, there she was:
This piece from our October 2011 issue won an award from the National Association of Black Journalists on June 24 for best magazine commentary/essay.
It's a packed house at St. Sabina's Church on the South Side of Chicago. The pews are full, and attendees who didn't come early on this August Sunday must huddle in the back, though they don't have to strain to hear the speakers, media maven Tavis Smiley and Princeton professor Cornel West.
Here's a follow-up to my mini-review last week of NBC's The Playboy Club: a Daily Beast article, "My Mom's Life as a Playboy Bunny," by Susanna Spier. Spier interviews her mother about what things were really like. Was Hugh Hefner's comment -- that bunnies could be anything they wanted to be -- accurate? Ha.
We had only a handful of options, and being a Bunny was a brand-new one. ... Teacher, nurse, stewardess, secretary. Bunny increased our options by 20 percent. It didn't mean we could be brain surgeons. Hef's dots do not connect.
Musical theater is as close as it comes to religion for me, so you can consider Glee's 8-to-9 Tuesday slot on Fox my "Hour of Power." Like a missionary outpost in D.C.'s cultural desert, each week a local gay bar screens the latest episode on a large projector. For that short span of time, the club music and cruising stop while patrons from their 20s to their 60s sit in reverent silence to watch the high-school travails of McKinley High's glee club.
If you ask me, any show that can hold a club queen's attention for that long deserves its title as "the gayest show on television."
Mark Addy portrays King Robert Baratheon in a scene from the HBO series "Game of Thrones" premiering Sunday, April 17. (AP Photo/HBO, Helen Sloan)
Caution: Spoilers
In 2009, National Review ranked Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy No. 11 on a list of the best "conservative movies" of the past 25 years. The magazine's reasoning was simple -- after September 11, the adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic fantasy novels were the perfect Manichean fable for conservatives as they cheered on and spurred America's march to war against an amorphous Muslim enemy in Iraq.
"The debates over what to do about Sauron and Saruman echoed our own disputes over the Iraq War," wrote Andrew Leigh, referring to the franchise's two epic villains -- a common reading for conservatives at the time.
