Since an earlier post of mine seems to have prompted this dead-on and entertaining polemic from Gene Healy, I should probably clarify that I’m in full agreement with his take on the sort of ludicrous warrior pose that seems to animate so much war boosterism. My point wasn’t that we should welcome the opportunity to […]

[Read more →]

Earvolution has released their list of the greatest fictional rock bands, and I’m delighted to see the nefarious American Medical Association from the cult-classic Illuminatus! Trilogy make the cut. On largely contrarian grounds, I’m sort of tickled to see the obvious choice for the top slot, Spinal Tap, bumped to second by Dr. Teeth and […]

[Read more →]

Liz at Yellow is the Color opens an interesting discussion of emotion and politics with this vaguely What’s the Matter With Kansas-flavored anecdote: My professor told us this story (which I am now going to promptly butcher) about his time on the campaign trail. In 2004, he was going door-to-door campaigning deep in the backwoods […]

[Read more →]

So, I’ve now become accustomed to running into alums of the American Parliamentary Debate Association in the wacky, wonky world of political journalism and punditry, but I just became aware, via a chance reference from a film-buff friend, that someone I knew very slightly from the old college circuit is now some sort of indie […]

[Read more →]

In a special Panopticon Edition of BloggingHeads TV, I chat with Spencer Ackerman about FISA, satellite surveillance, and the NSA lawsuits making their way through the Ninth Circuit.

[Read more →]

Nota bene, New Republic: the whole “counterintuitive” shtick has its merits, but it’s sort of cheating when the argument is counterintuitive because obviously wrong. The trick is to run pieces with premises as superficially implausible as Ben Wittes’ lukewarm endorsement of the Protect America Act, but which actually turn out to be at least somewhat […]

[Read more →]

“You know my methods in such cases, Watson. I put myself in the man’s place and, having first gauged his intelligence, I try to imagine how I should myself have proceeded under the same circumstances. In this case the matter was simplified by Brunton’s intelligence being quite first-rate, so that it was unnecessary to make […]

[Read more →]

Megan starts blogging at her new digs today.

[Read more →]

Wired‘s invaluable Threat Level blog has a detailed account of hearings earlier this week to determine whether a pair of lawsuits challenging alleged government wiretapping can continue. Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick has a good short summary of the tortuous logic that prompted one judge to announce he felt like a character in Alice in Wonderland. The […]

[Read more →]

I started noticing this last week, but the level of bald-faced mendacity indulged in by defenders of the recent FISA amendment is sort of gobsmacking, which is saying quite a bit given how little I expect of GOP dead-enders at this point. Consider this, from the Weekly Standard‘s blog: One of the last things Congress […]

[Read more →]