So, apparently Glenn Beck’s weird little frog stunt (below)—which they claim did not actually involve killing a real frog—seems to have perplexed a lot of people.  I thought it was pretty straightforward, so if you’re among the perplexed: I took the point to be that big, rapid, dramatic change can be more dangerous than seductively […]

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Richard Koman at ZDnet on proposed legislation to block FCC net neutrality rules: The amendment is a blatantly unconstitutional attempt to assert Congressional control of an executive function. They try to get around this by controlling “expenditures,” and I certainly don’t know the Supreme Court holdings on such approaches, but it seems to me that […]

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I’m happy to join in a bout of public lamentation over our national ignorance of—and hostility toward—science, but I’m extremely skeptical about this story, which seems to be getting a good deal of bloglove.  The premise is that a critically-hailed biopic about Charles Darwin isn’t finding a U.S. distributor because it will be “hugely divisive” […]

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I’m happy to see scholar Cass Sunstein finally confirmed to head OIRA despite the bizarre attempt to paint him as a fire-breathing radical determined to seize your guns—presumably using the mutant mastery of magnetism with which all OIRA directors are endowed.   The panic might have been avoided if, instead of mining his academic work […]

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Morning Edition today decided that opposition to Obamacare would make a good hook for an excursion into the psychology and biology of fear and political scare tactics. The scientific gloss here is so banal—did you know people who are frightened find it difficult to think rationally, and tend to pass scare stories on to others?—that […]

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Dave Weigel highlights a GOP health care “survey” that, even by the standards of these sorts of fake fundraising push-polls seems awfully egregious.  Among other things, it suggests that under Obamacare, Republicans will be singled out for inferior treatment or denied care. What actually jumped out at me, though, was another pair of questions: Do […]

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From the annals of “catchy political slogans that seem kinda creepy when you think about them,” a radio ad for the progressive group Blue Century: We train our soldiers – never leave a team member behind. It’s a code of  honor. Why is that good enough for our troops, but not the rest of us? […]

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Jon Henke, via Twitter, expresses a view I used to hold but now think is pretty clearly erroneous: Thought: There should be no difference between freedom of speech and freedom of press. It is not “special speech”. It’s just speech. Since we now understand the phrase “freedom of speech” in the First Amendment to cover […]

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I think Radley Balko has said almost everything I’d want to about the Whole Foods/John Mackey/Obamacare op-ed debacle—in two excellent posts here and here, so I’ll just add some scattered observations. What I find interesting is that the “boycott” doesn’t make a lot of sense in the traditional way: Usually the point is to pressure […]

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David Boaz thinks it’s “ridiculous” to see racism in the Obama-as-Heath-Ledger’s-Joker posters that have appeared recently. I have no idea what the creator’s actual intent was, but I certainly raised an eyebrow and wondered what was going on there—and not because I’m disposed to see all criticism of Barack Obama as inherently racist.  I think […]

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