I assume every blogger who’s ever worked at Cato will have to link this short Onion article now, and why should I be the exception? Political Scientists Discover New Form Of Government WASHINGTON, DC—Political scientists at the Cato Institute announced Monday that they have inadvertently synthesized a previously theoretical form of government known as megalocracy. […]

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I meant to link Brian Doherty’s column from last week, which makes a number of sound points, of which perhaps the most important is that in war even more than in most cases, assessing how things worked out “in the end” is often a matter of when you decide to stop the story. Eventually, Iraq […]

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So, I feel more than a little churlish picking on a publication that’s just run something I wrote, but the intro to this profile of Harry Reid in TAP is a sort of perfect storm of journalistic tics that set my teeth on edge. Harry Reid loves movies. “I go to the movies every chance […]

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The New York Times reports that New York landlords are increasingly refusing to rent to tenants who receive rent subsidy vouchers from the federal government. The landlords mostly say it’s because they’re tired of dealing with the program’s cumbersome bureaucracy, though some are reported to believe that the subsidized tenants “do not take care of […]

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A new Giuiliani radio ad about healthcare apparently botches the numbers on prostate cancer survival rates in the UK. In the spot, Rudy says his chance of surviving the disease in the British system would be just 44 percent, compared with 82 percent in the U.S. According to ABC, however: But the data Giuliani cites […]

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To my eternal shock, someone is actually paying attention to my sporadic posts about music scattered among the Very Serious political commentary: Music blogger Lumberjack Thief quizzed me about my musical proclivities and then assembled an excellent mix for an occasional series about the sonic preferences of DC wonks. If nothing else, check it out […]

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I’m of two minds about the recent resignation of eminent geneticist James Watson, following the publication of an interview in which the Nobel laureate suggested that Africans are inherently less intelligent than Europeans. On the one hand, I’m pretty confident that given all the various factors that influence intelligence—upbringing, adequacy of childhood diet, social expectations, […]

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Apart from being enormous fun on their own, Halloween parties always provide a little snapshot of the Zeitgeist by way of the costumes chosen. A few themes jumped out at me from this weekend’s shindig. Superheroes and comics characters are always popular, but I did notice that this year they were almost all Marvel characters: […]

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It may well be the case that modern American teens “do not know how to form a sentence” and “cannot write an intelligible paragraph.” It is, however, ill-advised to broach this topic in your newspaper column if you, too, seem to have some serious difficulties on these fronts.

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The manager at my local Rite Aid had security kick a gay couple out of the store a few weeks back, and with no other explanation for their ejection forthcoming, it seems reasonable to suppose (as the couple did) that the problem was simply with two men displaying mild mutual affection in public. I guess […]

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