Sully finds this 1994 gem from Rudy Giuliani: We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we […]

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Proof of my raging man crush on Chuck Klosterman: I eagerly devour even his columns about football—in this instance a meditation on our attitudes to steroids in football. (HT: Baylen) On the one hand, he notes, for all our hand-wringing about individual athletes who get caught juicing, the public manages to “regularly watch dozens of […]

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There’s been a flurry of blogospheric introspection lately, with posters plumbing their archives to see what they were wrong about in the days leading up to the Iraq war. I actually think my track record there was pretty good, so instead I’ll follow Tyler Cowen’s lead and note something I falsely believed in childhood: Until […]

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Ruth Rosen at TPMCafe (why is that name familiar? Ah yes!) is gushing about some anti–water privatization documentary she’s just seen. And what’s notable, given that there are surely cases of privatization-gone-wrong to focus on if you’re cherry picking for a polemical film, is how light on actual arguments this rather long post is. Rosen […]

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Replying to Megan’s offer of a bargain on school choice—liberals support vouchers, and we’ll support higher education spending for them—Kevin Drum writes: Double spending per student, for all I care. Sure, sure, this is hyperbole, but even so it represents a pretty straightforward admission of what many of us have always suspected: voucher proposals are […]

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Look, I was pulling for a Kerry victory last time around, and the Swift Boat campaign against him always struck me as pretty sleazy, but it’s genuinely disturbing to see Ezra gloating that the prospective U.S. ambassador to Belgium may find his nomination scuppered over his political donations: Senate Democrats, happily, aren’t eager to forgive […]

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Megs on school choice: I can build a pretty cogent argument in favour of single-provider education based on equity. We could conceivably say that we want every child in the country to receive a uniform educational product, in the interests of levelling the playing field as much as possible before we send them out to […]

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A letter to the editor in this morning’s Washington Post reminds us that when government treats citizens as though they’re incapable of making basic decisions about their own lives, you get plenty of citizens who decide they can’t be expected to make basic decisions about their own lives: In his March 12 letter, Edward Yingling […]

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Valerie Plame asserts that yes, she really was “covert” after all; Andy McCarthy insists she must be confused about what her own status was. Oh, also, “a zillion people a day” saw her go in and out of CIA HQ? This seems… dubious. I was in a car that took a wrong turn at the […]

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Lindsay Beyerstein gets it precisely right. Though on the question of taking measures in utero to determine the orientation of a child, I’m a bit fuzzier: Certainly, to the extent these are risky, it seems grotesque to chance leaving your child with some kind of serious physical defect just to ensure it comes out straight. […]

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