Glenn Reynolds: HMM: Rep. Ellison: Clinton Trying To Reap Benefit Of Obama-Muslim Smear. “I think that Barack Obama’ s Democratic opponents will say and do anything to try and win.” Well, yes. But why does Ellison think calling someone a Muslim is a “smear”? If somebody called me a Muslim, I wouldn’t feel smeared, any […]

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I meant to comment on something Matt Yglesias linked last week: A Washington Post report on recent psychological research suggesting that power tends to stunt empathy. You might call this another instance of researchers confirming conventional wisdom—”power corrupts.” But there’s a still more general lesson that might be drawn from this and a raft of […]

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Kathryn Jean Lopez wants to know: Will Andrew Sullivan, who endorsed John Kerry for president, ever not be labeled a “conservative blogger”? Here’s a better one: If Kathryn Jean Lopez thinks supporting George Bush is a sine qua non for being described as a “conservative blogger,” are we entitled to stop flattering her with the […]

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One of the very, very few practical perks of being a libertarian is that you will occasionally find yourself in conversations about what’s wrong with “our side” with groups of both liberals and conservatives. It very quickly becomes apparent that both groups are utterly convinced that “we” waste all our time in petty internecine squabbling, […]

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Will Wilkinson links an interesting new study of how Germans of various political orientations differently value money and status. Jonah Goldberg, in passing, offers this: Germans, it seems to me care more about status than Americans do. I don’t know whether this is true or not, but it does seem a little odd to see […]

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Jim Henley dissents from the oft-heard libertarian complaint about hipster appropriation of Soviet iconography, which typically comes in the form of the observation that nobody would dream of trying this with Nazi imagery. I think it’s worth stressing that it’s not communism that’s exceptional here, but Naziism: Its resistance to our tendency to turn everything […]

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Insty writes: THAT’S NOT VERY NEIGHBORLY: Mexican audience boos Miss USA. If an American audience booed Miss Mexico, it would be racism. Well, probably, because the average American is not acutely aware of or vehemently opposed to important elements of the policy of the Mexican government. So racism would be a pretty good default explanation. […]

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…or is $2 per mixed drink actually the baseline tip now? (Outside Manhattan, I mean—they have their own weird rules.) I’d been under the impression that $1/drink was more or less standard; now I’m wondering whether I’ve been gradually accumulating the seething hatred of all the booze-slingers at my local bars.

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Bloggers are up in arms over this weekend’s revelation that the NYPD conducted extensive surveillance of mostly-peaceful protest groups in the run-up to the 2004 Republican National Convention. (I was up there for Reason at the time and ended up covering a lot of the protests myself.) It would be disturbing is if the city’s […]

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Todd Zywicki at Volokh links a recent Wall Street Journal article on “Conspicuous Virtue,” advanced the modern analogue of Veblen’s conspicuous consumption. The article itself is behind the subscription wall, but Zywicki excerpts enough of the core argument to make clear that it’s an instance of the “unmasking” genre, where the putatively high-minded motives of […]

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