Our President is famous for the nicknames he bestows on those around him. Karl Rove is “Turd Blossum”, Condi Rice is “Guru”, Vladimir Putin is “Pootie-Poot.”
I’m in favor of censuring the President for authorizing criminal acts, but even if I weren’t, I’d find these more than a little creepy. The scatalogical and homoerotic overtones of [...]

Scarborough County seems to have jumped the shark. (It was a very little shark.)
In the February 13 Newsweek, Marc Peyser writes about Stephen Coubert:
He’s the host of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” a takeoff of talk-show blowhards like Bill O’Reilly and Joe Scarborough.
Newsweek and MSNBC are owned by the same company, and if you look [...]

Andrew Sullivan is impressed by the latest intelligence release from the Director of National Intelligence.
It purports to be a letter “between two senior al Qa’ida leaders, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, that was obtained during counterterrorism operations in Iraq, ” from July 9, 2005.
The letter paints a picture of a Jihad aimed at “the [...]

Justin at Right Side Redux ponders the similarities between the debate on Harriet Miers and the debate on Intelligent Design and asks his readers to draw parallels.
I don’t really see the parallels. It seems like the country is more united against Miers than for or against evolution. The only similarity that I can see is [...]

For some time I’ve had a post in the queue on probability as tool for knowing. There were essentially two points, both of which pertained to sequence of facts required to reach a conclusion. 1) If your conjecture depends on a number of highly improbable events, it is unlikely to be true. 2) If your [...]

The New York Times’ Public Editor, Byron Calame, is calling Times Editor Bill Keller, and by extension the Times, to account. In his column Even Geraldo Deserves a Fair Shake he points out the Time’s TV Critic Alessandra Stanley made a factual error about an event that she observed on TV. She claimed that Geraldo [...]

I needed a laugh.
In a Time story on Michael Brown’s resume when he became deputy head of FEMA, his former boss says,
He was very loyal. He was always on time. He always had on a suit and a starched white shirt.
Well with creditials like that, no wonder he has gone so far in the Bush [...]

Kevin Drum is in favor of a national shield law for reporters. This law would protect the ability of reporters to conceal their sources in federal courts. Similar protections for reporters exist in some states – California is one, and would be similar to the protections given to priests, lawyers and physicians, among others.
As Kevin [...]

Arrrgh!
Dave Eggers and friends weigh in on teacher compensation. They make many good points. Teachers don’t make much for their education and experience. They work under the supervision of politicians and are forced to teach to examinations that have little bearing on education.
Why don’t they address the elephant in the room of teacher’s salaries?
Teaching jobs [...]

The blogsphere is like a nuclear reactor. Every so often some topic will launch a chain reaction, this reaction will achieve criticality and the whole thing will go nuclear.
The latest victim is Rick Santorum, a perennial favorite, who I have defended before. Last Friday in the Philadelphia Daily News John Baer referred to [...]