Joel Mathis

Yes, this story could be better — for it to have some meaning, we'd get some insight as to why Tony Hovater became a Holocaust-denying Nazi sympathizer. But the critics go further, saying that the story "normalizes" Nazis. I dunno. Not sure how you can read this and think "gosh, that's normal": Or this: It's true, the story doesn't spend a lot of time screaming "this is bad!" But I suspect that's because the NYT editors know their audience probably doesn't include a lot of Nazi sympathizers, or even many folks who are Nazi agnostic.

Great piece by the New York Times about Harvey Weinstein's decades-long pattern of sexual harassment, but the Times makes one editorial choice I find weird and even a little upsetting. It uses this picture with the story: It's worth noting, of course, that Weinstein is connected to and moves among powerful figures. Yet this photo feels ... unnecessary. It's not the picture of Clinton with him that bothers me. It's the picture of Clinton laying her hands on Weinstein, who we are learning in this story is a serial sexual harasser . The combination of the two factors makes the picture look like something that it's not. I'm not one to obsess about the Times and its treatment of Clinton. I think her emails and Clinton Foundation practices were fair game for inquiry - and hell, I supported her during the primary season. This feels unnecessary, though. A little bit like piling on. Ick.

The other day I suggested that conservatives who really want to beef up enforcement against illegal immigration would have to live with a bigger and more expensive federal bureaucracy. I've been proven wrong by this morning's New York Times story about private companies that basically do the work of immigration enforcement for countries around the world. The really infuriating parts of the story will be familiar to anyone who has critiqued the privatizing of prisons in the United States: The illegal immigrants who are placed in the care of these private companies are often treated like cattle—with the problem being that ranchers generally want their herd to survive. The Times documents a number of cases where immigrants died or were badly injured while in the custody of the private companies. When that happens, companies are punished by ... losing contracts. The problem: Contracts are plentiful, and companies find it easy to replace the lost income. The profit motive works o

Here, finally, is the problem with Deborah Solomon's Sunday interviews: I always learn more about what's going on in Deborah Solomon's head than I ever do about the person she's interviewing. In her continuing attempts to provoke, wheedle and generally make an interview subject uncomfortable, Solomon has done far more to reveal her inner workings than to show us anything new about the often-familiar people she interviews. So it goes this week in her interview with former Secretary of State George P. Schultz . We learn that Ms. Solomon is still very, very angry about the U.S. invasion of Iraq. I don't blame her. But: She doesn't do much of a job in this interview in laying the groundwork for her apparent belief that Schultz -- motivated by his job with the Bechtel Group -- was a mover and shaker behind the scenes, prompting America to invade. Instead, her eight questions on the topic are a series of j'accuse! that culminates in the following exchange: I

In a story about RNC chief Michael Steele's visit to San Francisco, reporter Jesse McKinley offered up this quote-and-observation about Steele: And, of course, he quoted Cole Porter. Sort of. “It’s time to let you do that voodoo that you do very, very well,” he said. It's true that those lyrics originated in the Cole Porter song " You Do Something To Me. " But seriously: Almost every American male under the age of, oh, 50, probably knows the line a little better from this .

I've mentioned before my abiding distaste for the Deborah Solomon's Sunday interviews in the New York Times. Her questions tend to be confrontational -- even rude -- to no great purpose. So I was delighted to see today that she interviewed John Waters . Who would come off more tasteless -- the man who got Divine to eat dog feces on film ? Or a New York Times reporter? You already know the answer. Highlights: It has been more than a generation since your films “Pink Flamingos” and “Polyester” established you as a champion of the trash-into-art aesthetic. But now that bad taste is so prevalent in America, does it still carryan artistic charge for you? Bad taste per se does not, because today it’s reality television and gross-out, big-budget Hollywood comedies. Everything we export — it’s all about bad taste, so it’s not new anymore. You have to know the rules to break them with happiness, and thank God my mother taught me proper table manners. It gets better: We should me

Over at The Corner, Shannen Coffin -- Dick Cheney's lawyer during the Bush Presidency -- goes after the New York Times for its apparent hand-wringing over the "unauthorized disclosure" of the so-called " Climategate " e-mails. The post is called "Propriety in Newsgathering" and it deserves to be fisked a little bit. Let's start at the beginning: Since at least the Pentagon Papers case (and surely before even then), the New York Times has made many a nickel on unauthorized leaks of sensitive national security information. It's true the New York Times is a for-profit concern, but I think it's unseemly to suggest the Times tries to profit from -- as Coffin is going to get around to implying -- killing American soldiers. Most newspapers operate with two missions: A) to turn a profit and B) to serve the public. At their best, for-profit media has offered defenders of capitalism a success story: Doing well by doing good. Sometimes, "d

I've long hated Deborah Solomon's Q&A interviews in The New York Times Magazine. They've always come across -- to me, anyway -- as a weird combination of needlessly combative and unilluminating: confrontational for the sake of confrontation in a lot of cases, without any real payoff that helps the reader understand a subject or interviewee any better. In today's magazine, she gets down to the essence of her style in an interview with Craig Robinson, a basketball coach and the brother of Michelle Obama. He has a new book out, which leads to the following exchange : Are you aware that in your new book you erroneously describe Princeton, N.J., as “the first capital of the United States”? Oh. I was thinking that it was the first capital because that’s what I thought when I got to Princeton on the first day. I was awed by it. It was the second capital under the Articles of Confederation. I wonder why your editors failed to catch that. I wrote it, so I don’t w