French kissing
Can't get enough of that image of Jaques Chirac kissing Laura Bush's hand (I posted on this here and here). Now Adam Gopnik writes in The New Yorker that the French don't kiss hands - that's just our image of them (they prefer to kiss cheeks, one then the other). He says that Chirac was doing what he imagined the nice Texan lady expected of him. He was being gallant, diplomatic. Something Laura's husband has not been:

The Bush Administration has been conducting a kind of long-term experiment in what it would be like to have a foreign policy without any diplomacy at all... The art of diplomacy isn’t forcing people to do what you like. It’s persuading people to do what they don’t like.

France opposed the U.S. on Iraq, as did many "the great majority of countries and people in what used to be called the 'free world'," not because they're "weasels":

They have their own interests, but they oppose us because they think that we are wrong. If we’re going to get anywhere with the rest of the world, we might try shaking fewer fists and kissing some more hands ourselves, even at the price of sometimes looking silly in the papers.

9:42:34 PM      trackback [] 

My first blogroll link!
Rebecca Blood mentioned The Weblog Handbook the first time she found that another blogger was linking to her blog and how that spurred her to write more, knowing someone was reading. I just found my first referral at pregnancy by proxy. It's pretty cool to see 3rd House Party recommended. I suspect she found me in the Radio users group, since she mentions that they've helped her with her site issues. (By the way, people there have been incredibly helpful to me also.)

She also linked to a cool blog, The Alien in my Buddha, which is written by a woman who's expecting in her 40's. I have no kids, nor do I plan to, but I found this blog interesting because she writes of dealing with her aging parents (which I'm dealing with) and she's also in the Boston area and has been posting about the Red Sox among other things. The "blogosphere" is an interesting community.

5:35:50 PM      trackback [] 

My mother taught me to read

I don’t mean that just literally. My mother taught me that reading the newspaper and knowing what’s going on in the world is important. We had the local paper, the Nashua Telegraph, delivered every day. My grandmother saved her hometown paper, the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, so my mother could catch up when she visited. When home delivery of the Boston Globe became available, we got that, too. (We also listened to news on the local radio station every morning as we got ready for school and work, and in the evenings we watched the Boston and network TV news.)

My mother was astonished by people who didn’t read the paper, especially educated people. And my mother only had a high school education. Which is why I continue to be struck by George W. Bush’s revelation that he doesn’t read the papers. Didn’t his mother teach him anything? Barbara Bush went to Smith College for chrissakes, my alma mater (she quit midway to marry George senior). And you’d think his father would have had a better influence on him.

Not only does Bush not read the papers, but he’s trying his darndest to manipulate the media – press and TV reporters – as Frank Rich describes in this interesting critique of the media in today’s NY Times. (For the most part, they've been easy enough to manipulate.)

“All presidents rail against the press,” wrote Helen Thomas in a recent column. “It goes with the turf”:

Thomas Jefferson, relentless in his defense of the First Amendment, was fed up with the attacks on his leadership when he served as the nation's third president.

But Jefferson is remembered for saying he ''would rather have newspapers without government than government without newspapers.''

Bush is missing a lot by getting the news filtered by his staff. If he read a newspaper every day he would be sharing an experience with most Americans. Otherwise, he's just out of the loop.

3:20:35 PM      trackback [] 

Marlins beat the Yankees!
I didn't watch any of the World Series games - up until last night, and only the last couple of innings. I was at a dinner party and we turned on the TV in time to see the end of the game. I'm sorry I missed the Series because I hear there was some pretty good baseball. But like most Red Sox fans, I just wanted to forget baseball for the year.

Last night we were watching Josh Beckett pitch into the 8th inning, then into the 9th. We were all saying "geez shouldn't they take him out now?" after our own bad experience with Pedro. But this kid is big, strong, and seemed completely unintimidated. It was great to see him pull it off - a complete, shutout game. Sweet.

10:40:32 AM      trackback [] 

Saddam was "lusting in his heart" for nuclear weapons?
Josh Marshall has been very busy over at TPM. Check out his latest posts on David Kay's fruitless search for WMD as reported in the Washington Post.

The defenders of the White House now seem intent on lowering the bar to the most comical of levels, arguing that Saddam Hussein had not relinquished the “desire” or the “ambition” to have nuclear weapons. But by this standard (viz, Matthew 5:27-30) probably half the married men in America have cheated on their wives with Pam Anderson or Angelina Jolie. So I’m not quite sure what that proves.

The imminent threat, it seems, was that Saddam was lusting in his heart for nukes, not that he was doing anything to get them.

12:22:15 AM      trackback []