The Weekly Standard breathlessly touts an “exclusive story” over at Pajamas Media about the Justice Department doing outreach at the Islamic Society of North America’s annual convention. This is supposed to be outrageous because ISNA was named as an “unindicted conspirator” in the U.S. prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation, several founders of which were […]

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ZP Heller at HuffPo wonders: The contrary argument, of course, is that if Obama or Congress speak out more aggressively, it will endanger the reformists in Iran and give ammunition to Khamenei and his allies. Khamenei’s speech today pushed me to reexamine this line of thinking. He didn’t need an incendiary line from Obama to […]

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As you may have noticed, domestic hawks spent much of the weekend loudly demanding that Barack Obama, on behalf of the United States, bluntly take sides in a foreign electoral controversy. Victor David Hanson, without a trace of irony, tries to explain why this would be just dandy with some examples that are perhaps a […]

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I’m flattered to learn, via Techdirt, that Rep. Robert Wexler—by which I mean, in all likelihood, a 20-something staffer in his office—is among the readers of this humble blog. I’m slightly chagrined to see the idea of the “one-way hash argument” invoked on behalf of copyright maximalism: Julian Sanchez from CATO has discussed this exact […]

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This weekend I got to seriously considering whether perhaps I hadn’t better just pack it in and make a fresh start in some less doomed, more remunerative industry—which at present is pretty much anything short of buggy-whip manufacture. Maybe it’s failure of imagination, but to my own astonishment, I realized I was hard pressed to […]

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Since when do New York Times op-ed writers sound like Parade rejects? I would ask: What did you say or do as the shooters retreated into their xenophobic silo and consumed the bile slouching about the Internet? What did you say or do as the darkness in their hearts obscured the light of their reasoning, […]

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Reason‘s gallery of the ten most absurd moral panics to make Time cover stories is a joy to behold. The infamous mid-90s “cyberporn” cover—a perfect storm of Internet FUD for the tech-illiterate and “won’t someone think of the children” hysteria—has long been synonymous with the very concept of “moral panic” in my mind, but it […]

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Perhaps because more people have had time to actually read the speech by now, the effort to brand Sonia Sotomayor a racist on the basis of one decontexualized line from a talk seems to have simmered down.  The “softer” line is that she’s apparently “obsessed” with race and gender issues. By way of Steve Benen, […]

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It’s scarcely news that Hollywood has spent much of the last decade mining the comics pages for inspiration—and little enough surprise that they should, since comics narratives  have already proven they will work visually, and often come with a a built-in fanbase. Yet as the Watchmen film proved, the most formally brilliant works invariably lose […]

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On the whole, I find William Saletan a sharp analyst and an engaging writer.  This column, however, is really profoundly revolting. Your first clue that something might be awry comes with the kicker headline: “Is it wrong to murder an abortionist?” Sane people do not regard that as an open question—or, for that matter, a […]

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