Quite a

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So, most periodicals have ethics rules prohibiting reporters from accepting gifts of more than nominal value from any person or organization they’ve written about or might cover in the future. And, formal rules or no, this seems like something of a no-brainer. But it occurred to me today that I’ve attended, gratis, several very nice […]

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The folks at ThinkProgress are purporting to be upset about this exchange on Glen Beck’s show: [Michael] Graham asked Beck if he wanted to see the Clintons murdered in the [spoof Sopranos] video. “[S]eriously, Glenn, didn’t you at one point want to see, like, Paulie Walnuts or someone come in and just whack them both […]

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Kevin Drum suggests that Rudy Giuliani—who seems to imagine that having watched things blow up makes him a terrorism expert—is a prime example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect: Dunning and Kruger, in a famous series of tests, found that “Incompetent individuals, compared with their more competent peers, will dramatically overestimate their ability and performance relative to […]

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I normally dig on Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi, but his Adbusters piece on the sorry state of the American left is pretty weak sauce. (See Ross Douthat for a similar take.) First, the essay opens and closes with some rather odd reflections on the word liberal—its aesthetics and connotations—that treat the term as though it […]

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John Podhoretz thinks the makers of the insanely costly Evan Almighty have erred seriously in making (as his headline has it “A $200 Million Comedy About Evil Republicans,” which “basically writes off and insults the political views of one-third of the United States.” And how does the movie do this? Well, here’s the plot summary […]

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Glenn Greenwald is rounding up examples of conservatives who are now protesting that the president isn’t one of them, but who took just the opposite view back when Bush-43 was a moniker rather than an unrealistic goal for his approval ratings. Fair enough, especially when it comes to the people now carping about the immigration […]

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Via Radley. I thought he acquitted himself pretty well (in part because Stewart was clearly a friendly interviewer) but I did think there was room for improvement in his reply to the old saw about libertarians having to “trust corporations” even as they’re highly skeptical of government. Paul defrayed this with a joke about not […]

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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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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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