Daniel Larison on Karl Rove’s picture of himself as a latter-day Mark Hanna:
Rove’s errors were not merely political, but stemmed from a misreading of the very McKinley years he claims to admire and that he wishes to imitate.
A more compelling comparison between the GOP under Bush and an early twentieth century center-right party’s fate might […]

Order of the Phoenix was the least filmable of the books: there’s not much action, the mystery at the end is contrived, the climax takes place entirely within Harry’s mind, and a good chunk of the plot occurs off-screen.
We spend about six hundred pages moving chess pieces around the board to set up the […]

It goes without saying that the designated hitter is a travesty and a crime against baseball. So I was interesed to read, via Ken at Marginal Utility, an academic argument that Republicans prefer to see the pitcher bat, while Democrats prefer the designated hitter.
The paper itself is written almost as a parody of academic language:
Here, […]

Rick Esenberg tries to convince people that the GOP is the reality-based party:
Democrats try to chide Republicans by [sic] ignoring scientific consensus on global warming. I don’t buy into that, but don’t Democrats (at least the leftier versions) routinely disregard the consensus among economists on things like minimum wage laws, price controls, protectionism, high marginal […]

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board produces an hilariously inept attempt to “prove” that tax cuts increase tax revenue. Just how dumb do they think we are?

Tom tagged me with the “Eight random things about yourself” meme, so here goes:
1. I like formal wear, and probably alone among twenty-somethings in the English-speaking world, I wish it was still expected that engineers dress professionally, and that the man on the street wear a suit and a tie. I’ll always go upscale for […]

I’ve always liked George Will, both because he’s a fellow alum of my high school and because he’s a baseball fan. But his columns in the Post sometimes offer a glimpse into the long, dark tea-time of the conservative soul, and this week’s is a classic of the genre. Via Kevin Drum, I see […]

Awesome. The Live Earth concert has a gimmick which involves holding concerts on all seven continents. Which means that five scientists in the Antarctic will help headline a concert with an audience of two billion people:
Even for the superstars playing Live Earth — which begins in Sydney, Australia, at 10 Eastern time tonight (noon Saturday […]

Quote of the day:
I’m extremely skeptical that the pardon power is, on balance, a good thing. Clearly in principle it can be used to rectify serious injustices. In practice, however, the use I’m most familiar with is for Republican presidents to deploy the pardon power to facilitate cover-ups of serious wrongdoing — think Gerald Ford […]

It’s a standby of bad journalism — the interesting question to which the answer is no. From a Slate review of Transformers:
That planet was once home to two alien races: the upstanding Autobots and the sneaky Decepticons. (Does anyone but me hear the echo of “Democrats” and “Republicans” in these names?)
Although to be fair, Optimus […]

While giving DC’s House member a vote is a good thing, even if it means awarding an undeserved seat to Utah, taxation with partial representation is not really a legitimate compromise. Is there any reason the 580,000 residents of Washington are less deserving of representation in the Senate than the 515,000 residents of Wyoming, or […]

For the last six years, we’ve seen old-line Republicans continually upping the rhetorical ante against the incompetence, the dishonesty, and the misanthropy of an administration that will go down in history as one of our nation’s worst. Whether it was over Iraq, or Social Security, or far-right judges, or habeas corpus, or torture, there has […]

Shorter Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, in the Financial Times: Global warming is a hoax, because I like environmentalists even less than I like communists.

We’ve just installed Microsoft Office 2007 at work, and for some reason, Microsoft has decided to paint the application window title bar a very light, grayish blue color, which I suppose is supposed to be “translucent”. When compared to other applications that use the standard Windows UI, Office apps now look like they are always […]

With a tip of the hat to Scott:

What American accent do you have? (Best version so far)
Northern
You have a Northern accent. That could either be the Chicago/Detroit/Cleveland/Buffalo accent (easily recognizable) or the Western New England accent that news networks go for.

Click Here to Take This Quiz

It’s fun, but I think their claim to be […]