Common Sense
Damon Linker on appeals to common sense in American politics is worth reading, even if he overlooks the fact that like all rhetorical tropes, celebrating the intuition of the American people is a thoroughly...
Yearly Archive: 2009
For The Record
Jonah Goldberg (among others) seems offended by the fact that Obama blames the situation in Afghanistan on his predecessor. Blaming Bush may be evergreen for the Democrats, but in this case, it happens to...
Drink!
I didn’t have the opportunity to watch the speech tonight, but I have a long history of enjoying drinking games with a politician speech theme (the annual Bush SOTU drinking games I used to...
Rant of the Day
Ken at Popehat on the War on the War on Christmas. There are few things more likely to get a link from me than pointing out that the war against political correctness is almost...
Quick Reax to Leaked Obama Afghan Plan
The news is out on what appears to be the Obama plan on Afghanistan. It’s obviously quite provisional at this point, but it seems to line up with what I thought would be the...
It Can’t Happen Here
On the eve of Virginia’s absurd smoking ban, it seemed appropriate to link to Neil Clarke’s reflection on public smoking and the death of liberal England. Granted, Clarke is an old socialist with about...
The Only Thing That Matters in War is Looking Tough
Peter Feaver writing in the Shadow Gov’t blog does an e-squat and drops a steaming pile of foreign policy cow manure. But it’s worth reading insofar as it gives us a sense of Republican...
Mercy
It looks as if Huckabee’s decision to grant clemency to an unstable criminal will cost him the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. Joe Carter, who worked on the governor’s campaign, has written a great...
Charles Johnson breaks from the right
Well you saw this coming even if you didn’t read the interview I did with him a few weeks back. James Joyner parses out Johnson’s list and I have to say, I agree with...
conservatism and society
CONSERVATIVE, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others. ~ Ambrose Bierce People prefer simple explanations to complicated ones which is...
Public Service Announcement
League co-blogger Jamelle is kicking it over at The American Prospect’s group blog this week.
Podcast: The Golden Age of Television
I sat down with Freddie and Sonny Bunch, film critic for the Washington Times and a blogger at Conventional Folly, to talk about the A.V. Club’s much-discussed list of the decade’s best television shows....
healthcare reform and the appeal to emotion
“There are actual sick people with actual families feeling actual pain and facing actual tragedy because of this grotesque, wasteful, perverse, immoral, evil system that we labor under. Health care reform is a necessity...
love and blogging
William’s post reminds me of love, or of the process of falling in and out of love – or at least of the way that process has been mythologized in popular culture. Disenchantment is...
can’t win by not losing
In shocking news, a conservative thinks that America’s political future is conservative. Honestly, sometimes I think that the best thing going for liberalism is that conservatives are so busy declaring victory that they’ll have...
Did the Tar Heels invent the forward pass?
My Tar Heels had a rough day in football this weekend, losing to NC State by a point. But it was some small consolation to come across the suggestion that the Tar Heels invented...
one casualty
Read this important and heartbreaking column from Nicholas Kristof. I have said before and continue to say that opponents of health care reform simply have nothing to say in the face of the real,...
6 steps to disenchantment.
There are several bloggers and writers I used to love, but now I find them dry or irritating. I’ve gone through the same cycle with each of them. If you want to go through...
Gawker media’s commenting system
I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: this is untrammeled bullshit. Gawker media’s tiered commenting system, bannings and faux-exclusivity have nothing to do with maintaining decorum, or keeping the quality of the blogs...
