Republicans probably could’ve picked a more propitious time to propose a $100 million federal voucher program for low-income kids in failing schools. After all, it’s coming on the heels of a much-discussed Education Department report that, as The New York Times summarized it, “debunked the widely held belief that public schools were inferior to their […]

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Oy. So, Chris “Day by Day” Muir has learned that, as a rare right-wing cartoonist, he can build a huge audience without ever actually being, you know, funny or particularly artistically skilled, so long as he reinforces his readers’ worldview consistently. Now he’s moved on to a more ambitious feat: expounding on philosophy without having […]

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A BBC report cites research demonstrating that, shockingly, twins don’t feel their individuality is undermined by sharing genetic code with someone else, in support of the idea that the same would hold for clones. On the one hand, I can imagine someone doubting whether this finding sheds all that much light on, say, how it […]

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A front-page article in yesterday’s Washington Post provides a fascinating short history of mission creep in federal agricultural disaster relief programs, which should be required reading in courses on public choice. While the whole thing’s worth reading, you really get the essence of what you need to know in the headline: “No Drought Required For […]

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One of the comments below prompted the thought that this is a pretty good name for the notion, currently keeping many a liberal heart pumping, that if only the right set of buzzwords, metaphors, and slogans can be assembled, the scales will fall from the eyes of the masses and they’ll realize they’ve agreed with […]

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Awesome. There’s a bunch more animation/Lebowski mash-ups linked at Wired

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Since I mentioned Geoff Nunberg’s book Talking Right the other day, I noticed a weird amount of bloggy buzzing about a recent post in which Nunberg makes the slightly weird claim that the object-participle string of epithets trope (as in his subtitle, “How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-reading, […]

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I almost never remember my dreams, but lately I’ve found myself recalling one now and again. Last week, I dreamed an episode of the long-defunct sitcom Night Court revolving around lecherous prosecutor Dan Fielding, who as the episode closes has just decided to abjure some kink or other. Then, as the credits roll, we get […]

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In this weekend’s New York Times Book Review, Stanley Fish reviews the latest entrant in the “how Democrats got so screwed, with gestures in the direction of how they might get unscrewed” genre, linguist Geoff Nunberg’s How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show. Fish […]

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Did anyone else do a double-take at the cover of the most recent Washington City Paper? The illustration for the cover story (right) is a cluster of faces, all but one black. And the subhed? “Fifteen candidates are running for the Ward 5 D.C. council seat. You try telling them apart.” Maybe their copy writer […]

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