Category: Bits and Pieces

When I was growing up and a young adult (1960s through 1980s), stores such as Macy’s and Nordstrom, which catered to the carriage crowd, had the more restrained stuff.  If you wanted sleazy-wear, you went where the “poor” people shopped:  Sears, Mervyns, Penny’s, and Target.  We were poor, but my

WordPress doesn’t comfortably host polls, but I’m still very interested in your opinion about whether Hastert should resign.  Had I done a poll, it would have looked like this: Should Dennis Hastert resign? Yes, because he is actually culpable for not doing anything when he learned about the emails. Yes,

The phrase “habeas corpus” is being thrown around with abandon, both in the press and on my blog.  It’s useful to understand what it means, and how the Courts and Congress have treated the doctrine over the past 225 years, especially with regard to enemy detainees.  That’s why you should

Sleazy Foley’s IMs may have been, but underage shenanigans don’t seem to have been the problem: the page who was involved in the much publicized IMs was 18 at the time Foley played his little IM games. UPDATE:  Oh, dear!  It turns out that the first of the IMs went

Republicans have been big spenders. They’ve been weak on social security issues and immigration.  They’re disorganized.  They’re beset by scandals.  We should definitely throw the bums out — except that doing so may end up with our cutting off our noses to spite our faces.  Quin Hillyer argues convincingly that,

This is one smart family (and apparently, this year at least, America is one smart country): American Roger D. Kornberg, whose father won a Nobel Prize a half-century ago, was awarded the prize in chemistry Wednesday for his studies of how cells take information from genes to produce proteins. The

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Nels Peterson write about Harvard’s newest effort to affect legal debate:  the Harvard Law & Policy Review.  Here’s how they summarize it: According to the letter, the new journal “will be a forum through which many esteemed legal scholars, advocates and policymakers will rigorously engage and discuss

Curt, at Flopping Aces, has been following the story behind the Foley story: while his unbecoming conduct probably took place, it’s becoming ever more clear that the resulting scandal was very carefully orchestrated. That is, this was not the spontaneous revelation of information that abruptly came to light. Instead, it

Victor Davis Hanson, in a must-read article, rises to poetic heights as he surveys civilization’s end: But now all that hard-won effort [toward Enlightenment] of some 2,500 years is at risk. The new enemies of Reason are not the enraged democrats who executed Socrates, the Christian zealots who persecuted philosophers

Something bad and embarrassing happened to someone I know.  I’ve now been told the story three times in complete confidence by three people who heard the story from the source and promised not to pass it along.  I myself have not passed the story on to anyone, but it is

Al-Zawahri has emerged has the newest spokesman for the “Bush lied, people died” meme.  Frankly, if I were a major party during a time of war, I’d kind of prefer to distance myself from the enemy’s rhetoric and I’d be deeply disturbed to find that the enemy is echoing mine. 

If you don’t get the reference in this great Day by Day cartoon, you have to read Olbermann’s latest defense of Clinton and attack on Bush. Here’s a link to the video and a transcript. Then, read Iowahawk’s satire. The only problem with the satire is that, when you have

I’d heard that people who had more children were more likely to be conservative. Indeed, I think I read in Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything that this is a logical outgrowth of the fact that Dems are pro-choice, are more likely to limit the number

I really have to do some paying work, so I’ll just take a minute here to urge you to read Jonah Goldberg’s sterling column about context, torture and moral relativism.