Like many other anti-war types, I’ve joined the lament about the apparent lack of accountability for pundits who got it grievously wrong about Iraq. The familiar form of this complaint is that one ought generally to replace people who’ve been demonstrably poor at something with people who seem to be better at it. And that, […]

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At the risk of belaboring what one would hope is an elementary distinction, it’s worth saying something about the connotations of saying someone has “invited,” say, a terrorist attack. John Tabin thinks defenders of Ron Paul are contradicting themselves: Larison seems to think that saying that American policies invited 9/11 is somehow different from saying […]

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Tonight’s Colbert Report featured reporter Bob Deans talking about his new book The River Where America Began. Deans was talking about the early emergence of a sort of proto-democracy in colonial Jamestown, with the caveat that it’s not “democracy as we would recognize it,” since (among other things) “there was martial law, there was torture.” […]

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I can’t say I much regret having missed this AEI event on “Darwinism and Conservatism.” According to The Weekly Standard‘s account, the panelists grappled with such “knotty questions” as: Does reality have an ultimate, metaphysical foundation? Is there content to the universe? Maybe I’m betraying my roots in an analytic department, but I’m pretty confident […]

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As a postscript to the post below, a friend IMed to complain about something I’ve noticed as well over the past few years: As libertarian ideas become somewhat less marginal, gain a more recognizable voice in the national debate, we start to see the term “libertarian” applied to all sorts of notions on which I […]

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There’s plenty of glib, paint-by-numbers conservative fnord-phrases in this Kay Hymowitz piece on artificial insemination—”pretending nature doesn’t exist” and other such vacuities—but conspicuous by its absence is that pro-lifer favorite “life unworthy of life.” I say this because for all Hymowitz’s criticism of policies that enable small numbers of single women to bear children via […]

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Via Sager: “Maybe I should wait a couple weeks and see if it changes,” Mr. McCain said of Mr. Romney’s position on immigration this week. “Maybe he can get out his small varmint gun and drive those Guatemalans off his yard.”

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So, a while back, my “old” (which is to say, about 3-year-old) iPod photo’s clickwheel stopped working. As far as I could tell, the hard drive and software and logic components were all fine, and responded normally when hooked up to a computer. As an external hard drive, it worked just dandy. But with an […]

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Garance Franke-Ruta provoked a spectacular display of progressive unity a few weeks back when she suggested, in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, that the age of consent for women participating in porn be raised to 21. Basically everyone agreed that this was a horrendous idea that both infantilized women and—since even Garance agreed […]

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Ryan Sager has been looking into some comments that ran in Ron Paul’s old newsletter, claiming they show he’s “he’s pretty racist and also an anti-Semite.” The race comments are, in fact, quite awful. They include such gems as: If you have ever been robbed by a black teenaged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed […]

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