Much as I normally hate to see friends fight, it was gratifying to read Radley Balko’s rather pointed response to a post in which Matt Yglesias speculates about the motives behind libertarian organizations like Cato’s support for partial privatization of Social Security, mostly because such charges seem fairly common and because, at least with respect […]

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My reaction to the post-debate polls is a big fat jigga-wha? I watched the final face-off with a bunch of D.C. friends, many of them ex-debaters, many of them quite liberal. Everyone thought Bush won decisively. But the polls are showing that people thought Kerry won, and the margin in some of these polls is […]

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Once again the Supremes are faced with a contentious Eight Amendment case: This time around, they’re charged with deciding whether it’s cruel and unusual to execute murderers who committed their crime at age 16 or 17. We’re in a small and undistinguished club of nations who allow such executions, joined by Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, […]

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I’ve just seen the first episode of SciFi’s Proof Positive, the premise of which is that three mysterious or “paranormal” sounding stories are investigated, two of which will turn out to be nothing so mysterious (odd “rod” creatures captured on film turn out to be motion-blurred insects), the other is (dramatic pause) “proof positive.” It’s […]

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Tales from the Bushiverse

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Oh, cool.Official site here.

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So, Bush is now preparing an ad attacking Kerry for suggesting that our goal, since we can’t eradicate terrorism, is to reduce it to the level of a “nuisance.” And Kerry’s got an ad attacking Bush for saying of the war on terror “I don’t think you can win it.” As far as I can […]

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Back at NYU, I worked briefly for a former New Yorker editor named Gardner Botsford. His mind was clearly still razor sharp, but his eyesight had begun to dull, and he needed someone to read The New York Times (and, of course, The New Yorker). I didn’t get to know him well, but I did […]

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I’m not big on rising early on Sunday mornings, so it’s only recently, thanks to Comcast’s On Demand, that I’ve started watching Meet the Press. U.S. Senate candidates Ken Salazar and Pete Coors from Colorado were on today, and the boldness with which both of them simply refuse to answer even circuitously the questions they’re […]

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I’ll talk about the debates on RightTalk Internet radio around 2:30 or so today. Update: That was fun. The show’s archived on the site for the moment; I come in about halfway through.

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