At Long Last, Some ‘Cloverfield’ Viral Marketing Worth Half a DamnAs a simple people who just want to see a huge monster eat Manhattan and stomp on some young professionals, we’ve certainly had to put up with a lot of nonsense from J.J. Abrams and the Cloverfield viral-marketing team.
Lou Dobbs Pulls a Bloomberg
Though New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has been hogging all of the attention, he’s not the only one who’s been by flirting with entering the presidential race while coyly denying it (or, as David Remnick rather grossly put it in an editorial in the New Yorker this week, keeping “the interest of the press well fluffed”). As we mentioned back in November, CNN demagogue Lou Dobbs also dipped a toe into the stream, when he published a column on his Website about how a mysterious third-party candidate just may enter the race. The Wall Street Journal checks in with Dobbs today. “I haven’t got the personality or nature to be a politician,” he told them. Well, that’s that, right? But then! A teaser. “I cannot say never.” Not even when it involves giving rights to illegal aliens, Lou?
Here we go again. This reminds us: What’s Al Gore doing these days?
CNN’s Lou Dobbs for President? He Says No, Sort of
Wealth of Nation: Comment: The New Yorker [NYer]
Earlier:Lou Dobbs Is Thinking About Running For President???
early and often
Bob Shrum Shows Bill Kristol How It’s DoneHey guys! Did you see Bill Kristol’s first column appeared in the Times today? Boy, was it a doozy. Kristol took his classic conservative bluster and put it front and center on his first day:
Thank you, Senator Obama. You’ve defeated Senator Clinton in Iowa. It looks as if you’re about to beat her in New Hampshire. There will be no Clinton Restoration. A nation turns its grateful eyes to you. But gratitude for sparing us a third Clinton term only goes so far. Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term? After all, for all his ability and charm, Barack Obama is still a liberal Democrat.
Blah, blah, blah, Hillary is a national nightmare, liberal Democrats will doom us all. Pretty standard boilerplate, most likely selected to startle the tepidly Democratic readership of the Times opinion pages. But Kristol doesn’t teach us anything we don’t know (“some Democrats are licking their chops at the prospect of a Huckabee nomination”), and he doesn’t question anything we take for granted (“Voters seem to be enjoying making up their own minds this year. And Huckabee is a talented politician.”). So it’s not really that startling at all. But over in the Daily News, we get the same sort of indictment of Hillary Clinton and her campaign machine — only more surprising, this time it’s from former Clintonite and Democratic mastermind Bob Shrum.
in other news
SPLIT!!!!! Ann Coulter and Andrew SteinWhenever a longtime celebrity couple breaks up, it causes us to call into question everything we believe about relationships. When Padma Lakshmi and Salman Rushdie broke up, we felt hurt, and confused. It was the same with Sean and Robin Wright Penn. And then today, we read that Norah Jones and her longtime boyfriend and collaborator, Lee Alexander, split up. If they can’t work it out, we said to ourselves, then what hope is there for the rest of us? In this sort of climate, we wondered what celebrity couple would be next. Please God, we thought, please don’t take Jon Bon Jovi and his high-school sweetheart, Dorothea. But it was even worse. Today, “Page Six” reported the demise of the couple of the century, Ann Coulter and Andrew Stein.
Mediavore
Bloomberg Delivers Cheesecake; McDonald’s Takes on StarbucksHizzoner showed up to a political summit in Oklahoma with Junior’s cheesecake for all. [NYS]
Jennifer LeRoy sees another 30 years of LeRoy ownership at Tavern on the Green, but she isn’t striking a deal with Donald Trump to keep the place. [Insatiable Critic]
When world adventurer Anthony Bourdain found out that Food Network would be re-airing episodes of his series A Cook’s Tour, he was sitting by a pool in Hawaii. His reaction? “This was like being unexpectedly groped and publicly slipped the tongue by the ugliest girl at the prom.” [Anthony Bourdain’s Blog/Travel Channel]