Unqualified Offerings

Gah! Rolling along great – a rare treatment of class in SF television – and then, wipe wipe! they tidy it all up for the end of the hour. The double irony: I expected little based on the preview, then it all developed much more authoritatively than I thought it would, and then they ruined [...]

was written by Dave Weigel at Hit & Run. Dave does actual research and analysis that pretty convincingly deprecates the “Wilder effect,” aka “the 15 percent lie – the supposed percentage of whites who tell pollsters they would be willing to vote for a black candidate but in the privacy of the voting booth never [...]

By Thoreau
So, let’s say that one wants to reduce the amount of CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels.  Yeah, yeah, there are plenty of objections to be raised against that notion.  Let’s just table those for now, for the sake of argument.
Now, all sorts of statist proposals have been put forth to achieve that objective [...]

By Thoreau
Last week I read Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer:  Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements.  The main topic is movements and fanaticism, but it includes all sorts of observations on life, the universe, and everything.  I found it really, really interesting, so I’ve decided that for the next few days I’ll blog a [...]

Great Britain is withdrawing troops but sending compliant journalists. Damien McElroy’s gushing report from the USS Eisenhower, currently stationed off the Iranian coast, reads like a recruiting brochure. Then there’s this:

Iran’s belligerent posture has increased the challenges facing the Eisenhower since it deployed to the Middle East last October. Vice Admiral Patrick Walsh, the commander [...]

By Mona
Another day in America-hating Angry Left Bush-supporter, GOP extremism. CNN’s conservative commentator Glenn Beck finds common cause with Islamic jihadists, kinda like Dinesh D’Souza, who continues to hold vaunted places in right-wing institutions. Declares Beck:

BECK: You know, there`s a new poll out that Muslims, the higher educated Muslims in the Middle [...]

By Mona
[Edited for clarity shortly after posting.]
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Shush back at him (see his headline). Don’t tell GOP operative and Townhall columnist Patrick Ruffini that his imagined Victory in Iraq isn’t, or that Nancy Pelosi and Jack Murtha have nothing to do with the reasons why. Don’t disturb Ruffini’s oh-so-patriotic optimism that there is a [...]