Iran is the enemy; Al Qaeda is the enemy. Therefore Iran is Al Qaeda. Or so you might conclude from last night’s State of the Union address. Via Chris Preble (who has the highlight reel), Glenn Kessler takes the logic apart in The Washington Post.

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What the hell was up with Jim Webb? Was one of his old Army buddies dancing around off camera making faces and rubbing his own nipples? For most of the second half of his response he looked like he was this close to busting out laughing at some private joke.

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Here’s something I’d love to see: Get the writers from The Colbert Report to sit down and watch the State of the Union (with help from the advance script, of course), then air the speech on a ten minute delay with a running text “supplement” after the fashion of “The Word”. Addendum: OK, wow, never […]

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A little while back, I argued in a debate at Campus Progress that pro-choicers should hold the line against conceding there’s anything seriously wrong with abortion. Several commenters suggested that the malign influence of testosterone had rendered me insufficiently sympathetic to women facing the difficult decision of whether to terminate a pregnancy. So perhaps I’ll […]

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Does Sufjan Stevens owe minimalist composer Philip Glass a fat royalty check? Not literally—I’m not saying he’s done any direct rips—but something my father pointed out when I was home for the holidays is that most of Stevens’ songs, for all their elaborate arrangements, are built on the kind of undulating foundation that’s the hallmark […]

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Duncan Black has concluded that the best way to demonstrate your vast intellectual superiority over your political opponents is to knock out a series of glib one-line responses to serious policy questions, prefacing each with a condescending “Uh,” to indicate how very, very obvious your answers should be to anyone with a functioning prefrontal cortex.* […]

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I can’t say I’m shocked to discover The Washington Times, via its Insight magazine, would peddle a story about Barack Obama’s childhood attendance at a madrassa—a story that the most cursory scrutiny revealed to be complete bullshit. But I was a little taken aback by the magazine’s online response to its many critics on this […]

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I see (belatedly) via Arts & Letters Daily that the Texistentialist, University of Austin philosopher Robert Solomon, died earlier this month. The Chronicle of Higher Ed has just posthumously printed his final essay, in which he hits on many of the same themes as in this excerpt from Waking Life, which is how he’s best […]

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The Heritage Foundation has just released a paper on conservative “fusionism,” presumably at least implicitly meant as a response to the “conservative crack-up” and “liberaltarian” memes recently circulating. It’s interesting enough as history, but gets weirdly muddled and ethereal when it gets to the final section, a call for a “renewed” fusionism based on limited […]

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Three quick questions about this Kay Hymowitz piece: Is “Why men have become more discreet than women, assuming they have” really “one of those cultural mysteries that is yet to be solved”? Two words; Asymmetric incentives. I’m just going out on a limb here, but I’m guessing that (to pick one crude metric) the amount […]

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