Greg Brown

NY Times profile of Rush Limbaugh

It’s pretty good, but mainly a personal profile of Limbaugh himself and not an wide-angle view of the entire industry. For the latter, you’d be better suited to read David Foster Wallace’s (superbly excellent) profile of a lower-profile right-wing radio host named John Ziegler.

National Review blogger issues a knee-jerk condemnation of Wall-E's "leftist propaganda"

Debating the political leanings of films is a sometimes interesting, always tricky prospect. It’s undeniable that Wall-E critiqued something, and I think that critique was more European or anti-consumerist in its substance. But unlike most critiques in those veins, it didn’t draw from and rely on a larger liberal worldview. It invoked some of the criticisms that are often used as liberal shibboleths - like of big-box shopping malls, alienation from the environment, and obesity - while not really using them to propel into a larger conversation about politics.

I’ve also seen some interesting talk elsewhere over whether 300 represents some sort of neo-conservative/nationalist/fascist/insert-ist-here war fantasy. The movie makes Spartans out to be some force fighting for freedom and democracy and other Good Things, but they were actually a bunch of ancient assholes that ran around trashing real democracies like Athens and ethnically cleansing their own young. Of course, you could say that the movie deliberately presents itself within the frame of a guy mythologizing their history, and you can’t say it’s pushing the viewpoint if it admits to its unreliable-narrator status. But then again, does that really make a difference if the viewer is still left with the overwhelming impression that these are Good Guys, and without the sort of subversive unease that characterizes other glory-in-war films like Starship Troopers.