A Nobel Prize Winner in the Senate? It could happen. Minnesota's done weirder things (where's "The Body" nowadays?).
Noam Scheiber wants to turn "Goodling" into a common noun (as in, "The Bush administration cleaned house at FEMA and repopulated it with a bunch of goodlings."). I kind of like it as a verb though, as in "that department was running fine before it was goodlinged hardcore."
Eugene Volokh is generally against hate crime laws, but he's unconvinced by the "a murder is a murder" line of argument.
Even though it seems to have led to a reasonably good compromise, this story still makes me sad. I have to think that if I had been the customer at this store and this happened to me, I'd have been devastated and/or furious. And I honestly don't know how I'd respond (see also The Washington Post. Maybe its local-ness makes it hit closer to home).
The Congressional Black Caucus' partnership with Fox News always seemed like a weird match. Responding to a grassroots revolt against them by a group called Color of Change, the CBC tried tar them as "liberal activists". Which is weird, because a) obviously these Congresspeople's base consists of "liberal activists", b) most members of the CBC also probably would be considered "liberal activists", and c) why on earth should "liberal activist" be considered some sort of slur?
Paul Butler has an interesting post up on the education of poor students.
As more and more DOJ employees testify on Attorney-gate, the number of possible explanation for who created the infamous lists of attorneys to be fired is dwindling to immaculate conception.
Did John Edwards really say he's "not comfortable" around gays?
Matthew Yglesias is on fire:
But here's the thing: [Bernard] Lewis' views of Muslims are "quasi-racist" or whatever the appropriate term is for holding the sort of views about the members of a religious group that one would term "racist" were they held about a racial group. This is actually not inconsistent with the fact that Lewis is considerably more knowledgeable about the history of the Islamic world than I am, and my guess is that he knows more about this than Klein does as well. Colonial regimes in Africa were full of administrators who both new a bunch of stuff about Africa and also happened to be white supremacists -- both attributes were important job qualifications.
Meanwhile, Bush (and Podhoretz) aren't relying on Lewis to help them bone up before a Jeopardy appearance -- they're seeking expert support for their pre-existing commitment to the proposition that there's nothing wrong with U.S. policy toward the Muslim world that a little additional brutality couldn't fix.
You'd think that having a convicted robber as your predecessor in your post would make you look good by comparison. But you haven't met President Bush's Chief Domestic Policy Advisor, Karl Zinmeister.
And finally, I challenge you to be unhappy after reading about a gay Flamingo couple who just adopted a baby. Cuuuuute.
No comments:
Post a Comment