Unqualified Offerings

The two best arguments that I’ve seen for voting for Democrats anyway this fall come from hilzoy on Obsidian Wings and Lenny Bailes in comments at Making Light. Lenny:
Not voting for Democrats means that cowardly, malleable Democratic sheep will be replaced in Congress by more intractable Republican assholes. If the sheep perceive themselves to be [...]

The British angle on the military commissions act is interesting. TimesOnline reporter/blogger Mick Smith wonders
The truth is that British military commanders would have been in an understandable quandary. Handing over captured terrorists to the Americans has been avoided by the British recently because of the dubious practices in place – Guantanamo; secret prisons; and as [...]

To those caught out as false positives by Akismet, my spam filter, the last day or so, including Hesiod and my second oldest friend (in terms of duration of the friendship, I mean) Dave. Good thing Akismet isn’t president.
Akismet does a very good job of stopping genuine spam but it’s still getting more false positives [...]

When I saw the 65-34 tally on the Senate version of the hide-and-torture bill, I of course immediately wondered, So who the heck didn’t even vote? The answer is: Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME). (Via TPM Muckraker.) Her breakthrough book will be called Profiles in Storage.
UPDATE: jlw points out in comments that Snowe was at the [...]

Shameless hussy IOZ makes a useful point about life in authoritarian countries:
You talk about Soviet America, or Fascist America, and people look at you like you’re nuts because, after all, where are the bread lines? Where is the uniform drabness (well, okay, there’s plenty of that)? Where is the oppressive misery?
We seem to believe that [...]

Thoreau peers into his crystal ball in comments downblog:
In the meantime, here’s how I see them extending the principle that it’s OK to hide people away and torture them:
1) They’ll start by covering their fuck-ups: Guys who were under suspicion but turned out to be innocent. They’re already doing some of it, [...]

Of the million reasons to despise the official Democratic Party’s conduct during the course of passing the so-called detainee bill this week, especially the conduct of the party’s Senators, the greatest is this: even their cravenness is blinkered, myopic and inadequate to the moment. Attempting to avoid risking this election, they guaranteed losing all of [...]

John M. Ford is dead.
If I recall correctly, Camille Paglia once favorably compared Princess Di to Prince Charles by writing that every genuinely bright person reads everything she can get her hands on, highbrow or low. John M. Ford wrote everything there was to write, from sonnets to Star Trek novels. I knew him primarily [...]

Thanks to my man Dave Weigel, the book meme is now the first one to ever come back to me.
Curious to see whether Dave ultimately got it from me in the first place I back-traced his tags about a dozen deep before the trail ran cold. Near as I could tell, it got farther from [...]

reason’s interview with Wired editor and Long Tail author Chris Anderson is quite good. There’s a brief passage about Anderson’s dispute with Tail-skeptic Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal. As a former book retailer I’ll take Anderson’s side here: it makes no genuine sense to define the “head” of the demand curve as the [...]