- Whatzhisface goes after Obama. Bill Clinton on Charlie Rose Saturday night: “When is the last time we elected a president based on one year of service in the Senate before he started running?”” Obama responds: “I understand there’s a history of politics being all about slash and burn…. I recall what the Clintons themselves called the ‘politics of personal destruction’ — which they decried. My suspicion is that that’s just not where the country is at right now.”
- Can Mike Vick go from the D.O.C. to M.V.P.? Slate‘s Peter Keating wonders if Mike Vick will still be any good when he gets out of jail. “And not to kick a man when he’s down, but while Vick is in jail, his skills will be diminishing from a level that wasn’t as high as many people believed. On New Year’s Day 2003, when Vick took the Falcons to Green Bay and upset the Packers in the playoffs, it was easy to believe he would soon explode into greatness. Instead, that game was his peak moment.” (Read Mike Vick’s letter to the sentencing judge here.)
- Mitt Romney: stuntin’ like his daddy. Those inclined to see America as a nation run but plutocrats just got some ammunition. Money magazine estimates the net worth of John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain all sit comfortably in the $55-$30 million range. On the low end is your boy Barack, who is just barely a millionaire. (We all knew Romney was caking; what’s really shocking is that he’s 60 years old. I guess Latter Day Saint don’t crack.)
- Meet Tony Powell, Don Imus’s new sidekick. “‘I am not window-dressing, I am not a puppet on a string, I don’t dance for anybody, and I am not Don Imus’s lawn jockey”… Two weeks into his insertion into Mr. Imus’s inner circle, Mr. Powell is still feeling his way. There is the old guard — Mr. Imus (“the boss”), Charles McCord, his newsreader, and Bernard McGuirk, his acid-tongued producer — and the new kids on the conspicuously integrated block, himself and Karith Foster, a black female comedian. Officially, they are aboard to add humor and perspective and to incubate a dialogue on race relations.” [NYT]
- So then that means that RC Cola is for Kurds, right? An article in Time details the way Mideast politics contributed to the closing of a Palestinian family’s soda bottling plant. “Although the Yazegi operation is insignificant within PepsiCo’s $5.5 billion sales of beverages outside the U.S., politics loom large for American companies in the Middle East. Pepsi and Coke have been in Arab markets for decades. Under pressure from Jewish lobby groups, Coca-Cola opened in Israel after 1966 and was slapped on an Arab boycott list from 1967 to 1991. Pepsi opened in Israel only in 1992, after the boycott was lifted, giving rise to the often-repeated slogan in the Arab world that “Coke is for Jews, Pepsi is for Arabs.”
