Hawks have been falling over themselves to come up with cute monikers for war opponents like France and Germany, but what should we call countries that are going along, but for a price? Tom Spencer calls our reluctant allies in the region a “Coalition of the Bought Off.” But with all the news recently focusing […]

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If Arianna Huffington had needed to go to the hospital this weekend, would she have berated the SUV owner who got her doctor there?

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The inimitable Tom G. Palmer, who I must confess I had previously imagined sat at home singing along to Wagner’s Der Ring des Niebelungen in flawless German, recently dropped some fantastic noise on me: the album Sax Pax for a Sax by a lunatic genius named Moondog. Moondog is nominally a jazz artist, at least, […]

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Looks like it’s the season of parody, with two new blogs satirizing hawks and doves. Jesus’s General is a warblogger on steroids, while Peace in our Time offers a brief for appeasement. I think the first is more clever, but then, that might just be my bias showing.

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Via Will, a charming little ditty that explains to the kiddies all the wonderful things our government does. Lyrically a bit reminiscent of Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.” Addendum: P.J. Doland informs me that the song is based on an Australian children’s tune called “Tie Me Kangaroo Down.” Looking at the last […]

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The east end of the blogosphere is all atwitter about this Wall Street Journal op-ed, which has been mirrored by the Gryph for you registerophobes. Susan Lee offers a quick-and-dirty brief for libertarianism, with two main contentions that have some fellow travelers applauding, while others are rushing to distance themselves. The first of these is […]

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Someone at the NYT has a dry sense of humor: Because of an editing error, a front-page article yesterday about diplomatic developments in the Iraq crisis misidentified the Bush administration official who said about the weapons inspectors in Iraq, “At some point it will become obvious that it’s time for them to go.” It was […]

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It’s no secret to people who’ve read this blog for a while that my trust in our federal government is a rather weak and sickly little beast. Still, I’ve always taken pains to distance myself from the loony fringe that thinks every evil in the world has its origins in some smoky backroom in Washington, […]

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Around 1820, a pair of devoted Parisian opera-goers by the names of Sauton and Porcher formed an organization of professional applauders, cheerleaders, laughers and weepers called L’Assurance de Succès Dramatiques. Within a decade, many such groups, called claques — consisting of a chef de claque and his claqueurs — had sprung up in major cities […]

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My friend Möbius — so far to the left he makes me look like a Norman-Rockwell-painting centrist — has a good firsthand account of this weekend’s NYC protests over at Jakeneck. (No permalinks — scroll to the post “just got back from central booking…”)

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