I notice James Joyner and, via him, David Frum complaining about a certain attack that gets leveled against conservatives who are insufficiently infatuated with Sarah Palin or John McCain these days: That they’re effectively selling out their principles to win the approval of elite Beltway media types, who will henceforth invite them to posh cocktail […]

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At the risk of turning the blog into an ersatz RSS feed for my Ars stuff, I think this one really merits a look if you’re remotely interested in either copyright/patent policy or the way that completely bollocks statistics can get accepted as facts.  And in this case, it really matters: Two big flashy figures […]

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No, no, no.  This is really sort of insane.  What we saw tonight was a tolerably effective Palin as a function of being well-prepped—a Palin who did well, at least relative to expectations, by sticking to her prefab talking points instead of getting lured into attempting to respond to the questions. She pulled it off […]

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Since this old post still seems to get a fair amount of inbound linkage, I figured I’d help to clarify the origin of the common expression “in the tank”—as in “the media sure are in the tank for Obama/McCain this year!” The original “tank” here is a water tank, which also used to be a […]

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Bill Kristol claims the mantle of  “disestableshmantarian” and rejoices that John McCain is coming to shake up the entrenched elites: “After two decades of Bush and Clinton and Bush presidencies, we’re getting change.” Yes, this was in The New York Times, not The Onion. On a related note, see Jon Rauch’s biting National Journal column […]

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At least not every old piece is wince-inducing.  A vanity-Google this morning turned up a blogger linking to this old Reason piece on “judicial tyranny”—which I’m still surprisingly happy with, given that I think I’d knocked it out so quickly I had forgotten about it. One of the rare cases where I still like the […]

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There’s something really comforting to me about looking back at a piece I wrote four or five years ago and thinking, “God, what a clumsy piece of crap.”  If that sounds strange, consider the alternative: I feel like I used to look over stuff from a few year previous and think, “Huh, that’s as good […]

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I expect we don’t agree on a whole lot—beyond not caring much for the Bush administration—but I’ve long thought Rachel Maddow was the sharpest, most engaging personality on the regular bobblehead circuit. So I’m glad to hear she’s finally getting her own show. Might even make it worth keeping a TV when I move into […]

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For a while now, as regular readers know, I’ve been a frequent contributor to the remarkable, super smart tech news site Ars Technica. A few months ago they became part of the Condé Nast imperium, which has allowed them to begin expanding their coverage in a variety of ways.  And, as it turns out, I’m […]

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Whew! Deprived of a blog outlet, Matt Yglesias had been constrained to Twittering mini post-synopses for the past week.  I was worrying the backed up ideas might cause an aneurysm. Fortunately for him—and for those of us who’d missed the geniuine article—he’s back blogging at his new home on ThinkProgress.

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