I hadn’t realized quite how bad it had gotten. Glenn Reynolds is now apparently linking the likes of this post.  One of the many sad things to watch over the past eight years has been the erosion—and in some cases collapse—of the boundary between sane conservatism and the cuckoo-bananas fringe. I’d hoped the election would […]

[Read more →]

I have no idea what “bisexual” means.

[Read more →]

A thought stemming from a throwaway line in a post about something else over at Ars: Are we at the point yet of having developed multimedia dead metaphors? We’ve got tons of prose dead metaphors—expressions that started as evocative figures of speech but eventually lost any link to the original image they were supposed to […]

[Read more →]

It’s a week old now, but this Feministe post exhibits a type of category error that crops up in other contexts, so I figure it’s still worth saying a few words about it. The touchstone is this Rolling Stone postmortem of the battle over Caliornia’s Proposition 8, which concludes that the anti-gay amendment could have […]

[Read more →]

In something like six years of blogging, this may be the most spectacular act of institutional tone deafness I’ve seen—certainly from an institution that’s supposed to be all about using new media to advance a political agenda: This is Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progess Action Fund. Most readers know that […]

[Read more →]

So, it doesn’t bother me especially that Caroline Kennedy lacks “political experience.”  Rah-rah democracy and all that, but on the rare cases where we’re going to appoint someone to Congress, it seems like a grand opportunity to pick precisely the kind of person who wouldn’t normally get elected—someone who’s spent their life acquiring experience and […]

[Read more →]

[Read more →]

Oh, FireDogLake: Conservative ideologues looking to punish workers and the American middle class for auto industry failures are driven by an authoritarian worldview George Lakoff calls the strict parent model. Senate Republicans see their opposition to the rescue of Detroit as whipping the children. They are not that different from the failed father who thinks […]

[Read more →]

Not generally cross-linking my Ars articles or Law & Disorder blog posts, but since it’s not bylined, figured I’d throw out a pointer to a short piece about Barack Obama’s distributed phonebanking effort, which was the “Campaign Tech of the Year” in the annual Ars Awards. Also, damn, I really haven’t been posting here at […]

[Read more →]