Thomas Friedman

From Thomas Friedman's column in The New York Times this morning. He was writing about the lack of investment in American infrastructure, among other things:

If all Americans could compare Berlin’s luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II.

Last night, The New York Times turned its lobby into a party space, complete with couches, at least three open bars and a band. Press was denied access, but as was most of the newsroom.

Except for those who were invited. A press release said that the building opened before a "glittering crowd" and here's who they consider glittering: Thomas Friedman was there, along with reporter Helene Cooper, Maureen Dowd, Baghdad bureau chief James Glanz, Beijing bureau chief Joseph Kahn and assistant business editor and columnist Gretchen Morgenson. They all spoke on a panel to a crowd that included Arthur Sulzberger, Bill Keller, Frank Rich, Ray Kelly and--if they made it, though the Media Mob never spotted them while peering through the glass of the lobby for about 45 minutes--Eliot Spitzer, Chuck Schumer and Michael Bloomberg.

Times columnist Tom Friedman just delivered a speech at the Personal Democracy Forum entitled “What happens when we all have a dog’s hearing,” about the saturation of communication technology in our lives. (As if to prove his point, the speech was delivered against an audio backdrop of blogger key-strokes.)

After reading his speech, he told the audience that he didn’t think the 2008 election cycle was a big leap forward, technologically speaking.  read more »

BEIJING—I had just begun haggling for a silk comforter at the Yuexiu Market on Chaoyangmen Str  read more »

Bill Clinton has accepted an invitation from Rupert Murdoch to address News Corporation executives this August at a corporate retreat in Pebble Beach.

A News Corp. spokesperson confirmed that Murdoch had invited Clinton and globe-trotting New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman to speak at the event, which will be held at the Pebble Beach Golf Club. Friedman declined due to a scheduling conflict, according to the columnist's assistant and the News Corp. spokesperson. But Clinton was available and willing. "We have a good relationship with the former President," the spokesperson said.

--Gabriel Sherman

How fortunate that the opinion pages of our mightiest newspapers are open to diverse viewpoints.  read more »

Last year, Fareed Zakaria, the Newsweek International editor and television pundit, was invited to p  read more »

One of the interesting down-ballot outcomes of this race was a reminder of what a low-tech slog city politics really is. Andrew Rasiej, a tech entrepreneur who got lots of ink, not least here, for his plan for affordable wireless internet, wound up with just over 5% of the vote.

Michael Earl Brown, by contrast, didn't appear in the Campaign Finance Board's voter guide, or on televised debates. His campaign seems to have consisted largely of simple, black-and-white leaflets affixed to bus shelters around the city.

And Brown got over 9%.

Maybe it was simply race -- Brown was the only African-American campaigning for the job. Some suggest it had to do with his sharing a name with the hapless FEMA chief who was much in the news -- and whose photo NY1 briefly used as the Public Advocate returns came in -- though I'm not sure why that would win him votes.  read more »

Anyway, the bottom line seems to be that Thomas Friedman doesn't carry much weight in the Democratic primary.

NOTE: This post is corrected from an earlier version. If you see an error in a post, please email me instead of/as well as putting it in comments -- it'll be caught sooner that way.

Andrew Rasiej's longshot hopes of actually becoming Public Advocate seem to be pretty much dashed by the Times endorsement of Betsy Gotbaum this morning, which was as enthusiastic as they come this year.

But as vested as The Politicker is in Rasiej's core tech agenda, there was always kind of a disconnect in his campaign. You had the candidate, a charming guy with an interesting background. You had the issues, pressing and widely ignored. And you had the job, a kind of duplicative at-large City Council seat.

How the three -- Rasiej, wi-fi, Public Advocate -- connected -- well, that never quite made sense.

On the other hand, the candidate clearly tapped into a real flaw in New York: its weird allergy to technology, and its running blind spot about that allergy. (When it takes Thomas Friedman to notice a local candidate...)  read more »

So you have to think that Rasiej will drive the core of this campaign into some kind of, currently missing, independent tech advocacy organization. Which various bloggers, no doubt, will welcome.

Maureen Dowd and Thomas L.  read more »

Harold Evans and Tina Brown are, famously, editors.  read more »

When the tank pulled Saddam's statue down in Baghdad, and Iraqis-a small crowd of them, anyway-jumpe  read more »

Not quite one year ago, I spent a pleasant evening at the Pierre Hotel tasting the world's best bott  read more »

After terror comes fear, hysteria and loss of the power to think straight.  read more »

Boy, it's tough being a street protester these days.  read more »

It's two months since Secretary of State Madeleine Halfbright's remark that a couple of cruise missi  read more »