25 May
Speedtrap, Texas
According to the National Motorists Association, Houston is the
third biggest speed trap city in America. Oddly enough, I don't think I've ever been pulled over and given a speeding ticket by an HPD officer. It's all the towns around Houston (Pasadena in particular) that have nailed me. It's shoddy methodology makes me suspect it's actually that Houstonians have a broader definition of "speed trap" than other cities, rather than Houston being unusually bad in that regard. Considering that it doesn't adjust for population, it's amazing that Colorado Springs of all places would rank #2. [
source]
22 May
Copyrights
Mark Helprin provides the
best defense of permanent copyright that I've read to date, though I still think it falls short. Ross Douthat
explains why. Copyrights exist in order to reward artists and their financiers in order to encourage more and better art. Where a perpetual copyright becomes counterproductive is that is forbids derivative works (for books, movies, and other stories) or reproductions (for music, plays, and performance art). After all these years, no one can legally write a Mickey Mouse story but Disney, nobody can do Batman but Warner Bros, and so on. There are a lot of great stories out there going untold.
21 May
Gore '08
If the pictures of Al Gore in
this TIME article are recent, he's lost a lot of weight. I can think of no other reason for Gore to lose so much weight so quickly (after being pretty heavy for a couple of years) than serious consideration of pursuing the White House. He was previous just above the threshold of uncomfortably big for the camera, but unless those pictures are pretty doctored he now looks almost like what you would want a president to look like. None of this is good news for Republicans.
Evil Genius
The Houston Press has a
great tidbit about a kid that made an impressive map of his high school for the video game Counterstrike and got suspended for it. It's easy to say how ridiculous this is, but every time everyone starts shreiking about how Virginia Tech and Columbine High School and so on should have stepped in, this is the inevitable result. To look at the bright side, the ridiculous tactics may not be all that ridiculous: One way or another, the high school shootings mostly stopped.
A Convenient Diversion
According to the National Post Kevin Libin writes about
a poor young soul that had to watch An Inconvenient Truth in four different classes. This could be attributed to lefty indoctrination, but I think it could also be attributed to the laziness of some teachers. I remember back in grade school teachers would threaten to take away movie time on Fridays if we weren't good, but even at 8 years old we figured out that they needed it more than we wanted it.
18 May
Paul's Army
Ron Paul's email brigade, commented recently upon by
Mike Ahlf, has gotten the attention of
Byron York. It's difficult to underestimate the excitement and loyalty that one can obtain by being the only libertarian member of congress.
17 May
Bleep Bleeping Bleepers?
The Onion offers up
an interesting satire on band names. Probably pulled the names from one of the various
band name generators out there. I'm holding out for the debut album of "Pleasurable Benefit And The Getting" myself.
15 May
Democrats for Terror
The House Homeland Security Committee - headed by Democrat Bennie Thompson - is trying to make it so that
people who file tips on suspicious activity in good faith don't get immunity from prosecution. He thinks that when a bunch of Imams pop up in an airport, scream loudly in arabic, shout complaints about Bush and Jews/Christians, don't go to their assigned seats but instead set up covering the exits, order seat belt extensions and then set them on the floor rather than using them... the passengers who report this ought to get sued. And this is why I have such a hard time voting Democrat.
11 May
This Is Now
Now that we have a month with weak sales figures, Kevin Drum has
abruptly decided that sales figures are important. Go figure.
Proximity
I never realized before
how close Waco is to Crawford. Now all we need is a good conspiracy theory to tie President Bush to the Branch Davidians.
Cell Revolution
The Economist has a
good article up on how the cell phone has revolutionized the American economy. Judd
doesn't think it's worth it, though.
10 May
No Practice
Anyone know why The Practice isn't out on DVD yet? They're releasing the first season later this year. It was the kind of show that was made much more for DVD rather than syndication.
Hate
A
Democratic Daily post claims that objections to federal hate-crime laws are "protecting the sanctity of hate". This is correct: hate is sacrosanct, as are all private emotions, and no one should be accountable for his thoughts. Why do the people who think privacy requires legal abortion find this hard to understand? (Via Belmont Club)
08 May
Jindal
The National Review has a good piece on
the next governor of Louisiana. The question at this point is whether the evacuation of New Orleans will allow any Democrat to win statewide. Senator Landrieu is unfortunately looking pretty strong, though, so Louisiana may not be going as red as some of us would like.
Die Right
I can't say that I really like the writing, but I definitely agree with the point that he is trying to make: Die Hard and PG-13
do not mix.
07 May
Bad Product Names
It's one thing to name your product something stupid. It's another to
name it in a way that's almost inviting a lawsuit.
06 May
Brits for America
There was a debate at the Oxford Union in the UK as to whether or not America
should exist. It was apparently a pro-US walk. I'm actually a bit surprised and wouldn't have been offended at all had the vote gone the other way. One would think just out of national pride they'd wished that they had won that war. Then again, national pride over there does not seem to be a particularly strong force.
02 May
So much for Obama
Obama's campaign - which got an early boost from a fan's MySpace page on him - has now
outright stolen the page from that person. So much for my having any shred of respect for Obama. When you can't even respect your own supporters enough to work with them, you don't deserve to have any.
01 May
DRMage
The Economist has a good piece on where Digital Rights Management (DRM)
went wrong. Meanwhile, the RIAA is claiming defacto ownership of material that
isn't theirs and still persistently trying to
force consumers to "rent" music rather than buy it.
Frist Exonerated
Former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has apparently been
exonerated of the charges that were the final nail in the coffin of his presidential aspirations. It's unfortunate that he went through what he did on a bum rap, but as with the George Allen loss it was good for the GOP to have another sure-loser removed from '08 nomination consideration.
What The UN Should Have Been
John McCain wants a
League of Democracies, which is something I have been hoping for for a while now. The UN was obviously set up to bring together many different kinds of governments during the Cold War. But with democracy's spread since I think it would be much better to have a new dinner table with only those that elect their leaders having the opportunity to sit. McCain seems to have something with more military muscle in time, but we have to remember that most world democracies opposed our last incursion vociferously. The point isn't for us all to agree, it's for discussions to take place that dictators cannot be a part of.
Alas, Douthat
It's sad to see Ross Douthat leaving
The American Scene for the Atlantic Monthly because it was so nice to have two quality bloggers running a blog without
Steve Verdon-like deadweight, though naturally I wish him well and his
new blog is instantly a part of my rotation. The lone Scene-er, Reihan Salam, says that more bloggers will be added to the Scene. I can't wait!
Kerry Blues
The people of the Massachusetts are apparently
tiring of John Kerry with an approval rating in the low-40's and a "someone new" number in the fifties. Orrin Judd thinks that this could be
Mitt Romney's best opportunity, but I think he's probably burned that bridge with his rush to cover the right in the presidential election. Does Paul Celucci still maintain Mass. residency?
30 April
Quote: Smarties
"If they weren't smarter than everyone else you'd swear they had no idea what they're talking about." -
Orrin Judd, in reference to climatologists.
29 April
A Black Search
If Google were to switch their webpage from
white to black, it's possible that we could save some real energy! It'd also be easier on the eyes. I'm one of the few people that thinks we should have stuck with black as the default background color.
Kolb to Eagles
UH quarterback Kevin Kolb
beat expectations and was drafted early in the second round by the Philadelphia Eagles. It was my hope that the Houston Texans would nab him, but I'm pleased as punch he got drafted so early. The Eagles now have four quarterbacks so it seems quite possible that they drafted him for trade-bait. Regardless, it'll help recruiting. Let's just hope that his NFL career fares better than that of Ware and Klingler.
17th NFL Game
The NFL is apparently giving thought to a
17th season game. I say go to 20 and get rid of the playoffs! Kidding, of course. I honestly don't care much one way or the other. With the playoff system they have, though, that 17th game doesn't matter nearly as much as that 12th NCAA game.
When I Grow Up
We may not be experiencing huge monetary inflation, but we are apparently experiencing inflations
within the minds of youngsters. Apparently the average amount that teens see themselves receiving is $145,500 when they get older. That's more than twice what I thought I might someday get. Of course, that figure was derived almost exclusively on what I understood my father to make. Then again, that's probably a more reliably predictor than whatever it is these young whippersnappers are using.
27 April
Alabama
I don't know what's more
depressing: not a single Alabama Republican state senator voted for a resolution apologizing for slavery or that one of the reasons given is that Alabamians decided that this was the pressing issue with which they needed to contact their state senator about in order to shoot it down. I agree with
Mac Thomason: the resolution is really not necessary, but once it's on the table you do not refuse to apologize on behalf of a state that enslaved people.
25 April
Quote: Cheap Hussy
"As it happens I've long aspired to writing Lifetime Channel screenplays. (I'm actually not kidding about this.) For example, I'd love to write a counterpoint to Not Without My Daughter
from the perspective of the crazy Iranian father, Oh No You Ain't Dressing My Daughter Like A Cheap Hussy
!" -
Reihan Salam
Note To Firefox People
Please add a search window option for TV.com and Google Images. It's a lot more useful than some of the ones you got. Extra points if you make one for the CIA World Handbook.
Calling Studio 60
It seems increasingly apparent that Studio 60 won't survive past this season. Hopefully that just means that Sorkin will try again with a better concept. But I do hope that the hiatus it's taking now is so that the last six episodes or so will end up wrapping up storylines. Sorkin did a pretty good job wrapping up Sports Night, so hope springs eternal.
24 April
Note to Software Publishers
If you're going to publish something on a DVD, don't write "CD-ROM" in big letters on the sleeve, and don't write "CD-ROM" in the instructions whenever you reference your product. Please. It confuses the people I have to help figure out why their CD-ROM won't work in their CD-ROM drive.
Boris
It's easy to forget Boris Yeltsin's greatness. But to gauge it one must consider the relative impotence of his predecessor and the ignobility of his successor. Russia would be a much better place if he'd been able to keep his demons at bay for a few more years. A tidbit from the NYT
obituary:
During a visit to the United States in 1989 he became more convinced than ever that Russia had been ruinously damaged by its centralized, state-run economic system, where people stood in long lines to buy the most basic needs of life and more often than not found the shelves bare. He was overwhelmed by what he saw at a Houston supermarket, by the kaleidoscopic variety of meats and vegetables available to ordinary Americans.
23 April
Super!
A kid who can type text messages
this fast, and sends over 8,000 text messages a month. She's 13 now. Next up: she will be the first 14-year-old who needs carpal tunnel surgery.
Radio What Now?
I've not been as big of a fan of The Onion since they moved out of Wisconsin, but
this article is just classic. And no, I can't figure out why Radio Shack is still around either, especially since almost nobody repairs broken electronics anymore.
Too Many Docs
Ironic that we don't have enough doctors wherein access to medicine is supposedly restricted to the economically comfortable, wherein they have
too many in the land of free health care for all. The question I guess is whether this amounts to a denial of medical care over there, an excess of health care over here, excessive barriers to entry into the medical profession here, or insufficient barriers to entry over there. Or what combination of the four.
Doctors of Salvation?
I'm not Catholic so I'll leave them to sort out the theology, but isn't a logical conclusion to
the Catholic Church's denial of limbo that a mother that aborts her child and the doctors that perform the procedure delivering the child into Eternal Salvation? In essense, denying them the chance to lose God's grace? On the other hand, to say that babies that never had the chance to be baptized should be condemned to eternal limbo is to condemn a lot of miscarried babies. It's an unavoidably sticky subject, I guess.
AL Rules
The AL is unquestionably the stronger of the two leagues, but if the NL is
so weak as to be comparable to Japanese baseball the MLB needs to start recruiting a lot more Japanese players and the AL needs to wonder why it's only won 3 of the last 5 World Series matchups. Of course, that the two NL victors were beneficiaries of an expanded playoff system should give playoff advocates of other sports pause.
Edward$ Haircut
This is a much better non-issue for Republicans to harp on than a feud with a neighbor failing to keep up his deteriorating property. People can relate to neighborly feuds, but no one can relate to a $400 haircut and few would expect the recipient of such a haircut to relate to their daily concerns.
Restricting Gov't
Every now and again congressional Republicans remind us
why they matter. On the other hand the fact that Democrats are going after this successful Bush program should serve as a reminder of the dangers of expansion of government even when it's done in a more market-friendly manner.
Valuable McJobs?
Maybe I need to dust 0ff my short stint at
McDonalds and put it back in my resume!
19 April
Ron Paul - not my guy
While we've discussed Ron Paul here before, it's extremely intriguing to hear about him from
one of his formerly very close staffers, who basically says he's a two-faced politician who plays his district for chumps.
18 April
The Hit List
Over at Hot Air, there's video of Tammy Bruce (a former NOW leader, not at all a right-wing person) who has an exposure of how it is Don Imus' remarks got attention. Seems it was
more of a coordinated hit than a "spontaneous" anything. Anybody surprised by the fact that the "outrage" crowd has people sitting around looking for things to be "outraged" against?
Taser-Riffic
"Community Activists", a while back, insisted that the police get tasers because it gave them an alternative to deadly force. When someone tries to
abduct a kid from the maternity ward and threatens a "hostage situation", I'd say tasering them is warranted. As for the mom who claims the kid "hasn't been the same": she's 3 days old. She eats, she poops, she screams. That is the extent of what a 3 day old baby does, and if you think you can see a "change", you're delusional.
17 April
VTragedy
I'm only slightly reluctant to bring up the political side to the tragedy at Virginia Tech, but since gun control advocates haven't been shy about it I'll throw in a couple of thoughts. First, Republicans can only hope that gun control advocates and the Democrats use this to rally for gun control. There's a case to be made that Columbine cost Gore the election in 2000 as the Democrats were lulled into a sense that the gun control issue would be a winner for them and Gore had a hard time shaking that in West Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas any one of which would have flipped the election. The second thought involves the (debunked, as far as I know) rumors that this may have been a Muslim terrorist. It goes to show how stupid the terrorists are. Three things like this a month would do more damage to this country than 9/11 did in under six months.
Addendum: Ezra Klein and
Atrios speak sense.
Immaculate Bushes
Rosie O'Donnell
writes, in the same winding post, that we shouldn't fear terrorists because they are mothers and fathers. But then in the same post writes that there's a great deal to fear about Bush. I suppose the logical conclusion is that the Bush twins are the product of a turkey baster, the mailman, or immaculate conception.
Tierney on Dating
NYT's John Tierney has a
fascinating blog pertaining to American dating habits using data from personals sites and speed-dating schemes. Most recently he wrote on how women are
more likely to seek out a partner of the same race and previously wrote on whether men or women are
more picky in general.
Men At Work
According to a new study, conventional wisdom about women doing more work+housework is
false in the US, both do about 7.9 hours a day. It could be that stay-at-home moms doing less than 8 hours a day of housework/childrearing are throwing off the numbers or as Ross Douthat
points out it's also possible that women are underreporting childrearing. I know that my wife does a lot more work than I do, but I can't make up for the medical resident hours she works so I'll just accept being a lazy bum.
16 April
A Taxing Burden
Nothing like tax season to get us talking about taxes. According to the
LA Times the tax burden as a percentage of total revenue is being shifted to fewer taxpayers, but according to the
Boston Globe as a percentage of personal income the rich are paying less in comparison to those with less and we are in danger of having a flat tax. These of course are not at all mutually exclusive, but they do strike at the question of how "fair" taxation should be defined.
15 April
Seattle's Worst
So I just found out that
Seattle's Best Coffee was bought out by Starbucks a couple years ago. If true how come Seattle's Best coffee continues to taste so much worse than Starbucks's?
13 April
High But Fair
According a
Gallup poll, 53% of Americans think that their taxes are too high but 60% believe that their taxes are fair. Some see contradiction in those two, though I don't necessarily. Whether a level of taxation is fair can be determined regardless of whether or not the rate itself is too high. If you see everyone's taxes as too high you can still think it's fair that you pay your share along with everyone else.
Playing A Dangerous Game
ABC's Terry Moran comes
on the verge of making some great points about the wrongly accused Duke LaCrosse players. Unfortunately he only dipped his toe in the moral judgment argument while diving straight into the weaker racial argument. Though they of course did not deserve the hellfire that fell down upon them, they did put themselves into the situation by engaging in deeply immoral and demeaning behavior. Unfortunately Moran prefers the comfy liberal argument that we shouldn't feel sorry for them because they are rich and white, which is both a logically and morally shallow argument.
12 April
Hurrah Houston II
According to Monster.com, Houston has
the best job market "in terms of year-over-year growth in online job demand" and Dallas is #2. I'm not sure how much stock to put in a measurement that puts Cleveland at #4, though.
11 April
Imus Mania
I haven't had much to say on the whole Don Imus thing because I really don't care. On one hand I am a little annoyed at the almost mechanical lining up black leaders that make money by being offended against whites that think that blacks getting upset at anything short of a burning cross in their front yard are blowing everything all out of proportion. And the end of the day Don Imus said something really stupid and unfunny of little or no actual entertainment value. Considering how much he has to talk it's not surprising that these things come out, but I don't see him and his ilk as contributers to our culture and I'm disinclined to line up beside him simply because the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are lining up against him.
Studies on Immigration
As the issue heats up, a number of groups have done some studies on the effects of immigrants (mostly of the illegal sort) have on American society. Robert Rechter studies the
drag they create on the economy, though a
UNC study says that Hispanic immigrants (of the legal and illegal sort) added $9B to the economy of North Carolina while only taking $61M in benefits. The Immigration Policy Center has a study that tags the notion of an immigrant-crime corrolation a
myth. The Center for Immigration Studies looks at the mildly
negative impact that immigrants have on Native-Born workers.
Your Own Debt
After reading more than a few articles talking about how those in debt were
trapped there by evil bankers in curly moustaches, it's nice to
read an article that points out that excuses will only take you so far.
Frontiers in Gullibility
I can understand people being taken in by Michael Moore or Al Gore. But how do you explain someone who thinks
Fun with Dick and Jane is a documentary? "At its best, though, the movie is a borderline cathartic salute to a burgeoning pink-slip subculture of dedicated office drones forced into Starbucks hold-ups..."
10 April
The Rabid Republican
Republicans would do well to back off
this story about Elizabeth Edwards's malcontentment with a Republican neighbor. Let's get real, folks, no one wants to live next to the gun-wielding crank that doesn't take care of his property. Feuds like this exist across the country and the fact that the Edwardses are involved in one doesn't speak much of anything to their detriment.
Film reviews in five words or less: The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952)
Why Hemingway killed himself.
09 April
Hurrah H-Town
Houston has apparently
passed up Miami as the sixth largest metro area. I'm naturally pleased, but a bit confused. I thought Houston was in the 8-10 range, not the 6-8 range.
The Cos
The Boston Globe has a
great piece of the trek of Bill Cosby, the doctorate he got from UMass, and how he thought that Fat Albert could save black America.
Shadow Government II
The USA Today pens
an editorial echoing the sentiments of the
Washington Post regarding the inappropriateness of Pelosi's envoy to Syria.
05 April
Shadow Government?
The Washington Post - usually very left-wing - says Nancy Pelosi has
gone too far by visiting Syria and making the statements she made. Best line: "The really striking development here is the attempt by a Democratic congressional leader to substitute her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican president."
04 April
Science and God
CNN's got a scientist making a
great case for science and religion not being mutually exclusive.
Break Free!
Pieces on how liberalism (or conservatism, for that matter) fails because its proponents are self-constrained have become rather tedious (particularly after watching as much West Wing as I have), but I thought
this Slate piece on Grand Theft Auto actually made some decent points.
Stealing Carolina
Texas Longhorn women's basketball has nabbed the head coach of the Duke program. I think that's the third straight time that a big-sport coach has been taken by UT from the state of North Carolina. They're probably getting sick of that.
03 April
Comical Wordiness
I've got to wonder if Greg Cox is a little too wordy of a writer if he's having trouble fitting
seven comic book scripts into a novel-sized novelization.
Serialized Frustration
This article on the Sopranos confronts the elephant in the room of serialized drama: networks are going to have to try to find ways to finish what they started if they're going to want us to invest time and energy into new serials. On a related note, after much waiting the second season of Twin Peaks was released to DVD today. I anxiously await the release of Season Three so that I can find out what happened with Coop's being possessed by the Evil Bob. Oh wait, there was no Season Three!
Sans DRM
I really hope that the
much-touted agreement between EMI and Apple works out very well. Even though I'm not as sanguine on how well the record companies will do without DRM, I would absolutely love to be proven wrong. Or at least proven wrong long enough for the cat to be let out of the bag!
Recount Recollection
I'm not sure what to think about the
proposed movie about the 2000 election recount. I'm rather skeptical that it will be fair. Partially because it's so difficult to determine what exactly fair is, which was part of the problem behind the whole fiasco. I'll probably watch it, though.
02 April
Cancelled
My best friend was in a band called The Drinks. In addition to being an incredibly lame name, it was also problematic because the marquees at the bars said "Tonight: Drinks" to which passerbies probably said "Duh." In that vein the name Half Price Drinks would have been a better attention-getter, though could lead to some bartenders having a bad night. Anyhow, I thought of this in reference to a band called
Cancelled, which had to change its name due to the same sort of confusion. Tonight: Cancelled.
Mitt's Flop
I'm a little concerned that Republicans and conservatives are going to learn the
wrong lesson from the troubles with Mitt Romney's healthcare plan in Massachusetts and insist that health care reform plans need to be modest. The biggest problems of Romney's plan seem to be in implementation (namely the onerous requirements of what the insurance companies would have to cover) and circumstantial (Massachusetts is not an ideal place to try a plan like that) rather than simply the requirement that everyone that can afford health insurance buys health insurance. I have a sinking feeling that Republicans are going to keep whistling past the graveyard on this issue and put all of their stock in HSAs, which are a great idea but not enough to keep the health care nationalizers at bay.
30 March
Jeepers Creepers
Two fifth-grade students allegedly
had sex and two others fondled one another while everyone was at an assembly addressing a student allegedly stabbing another student to death over the previous weekend. The principal and local sheriff are trying to assure everyone that this is not how the school usually operates. Good to know.
Great Division (v2.0)
The Great Divide (v2.0) is breaking up, but before they do they are at least doing one final show in Texas tomorrow night. I thought that Mike McClure got the better end of the
McClure/TGD split a few years ago (wherein I also caught their
last Texas show), though I did catch one post-McClure TGD show and
had a blast. Their CD was a disappointment, but it's hard to pass up a last opportunity.
Western Warning
I think it's a mistake for libertarian-types to put too much hope into the
interior west. My experience out there may be a little atypical because of the area's Mormon influence, but by and large I found the people out there to be somewhat economically liberal (insofar as they believed that the government should be helping them out) and even the non-Mormons to be somewhat socially conservative.
Idiom Trouble
The letters coming out of Iran, allegedly from the British hostages, are singularly unconvincing. Howlers like "To British People:" as the salutation, "Bush and Blair's intervening war", and so on. It's as if the writers didn't speak English...
Wooded Housing
In the NYT, Austan Goolsbee
makes the case that "irresponsible" mortgages are the only ticket some poor people have to home ownership, but he (or possibly Sen. Dodd, who is proposing legislation) is talking about some of the less objectionable mortgages. The problem is not low down payments or ARM loans, the problem is loans wherein ten years into it the buyer has not paid off a dime of the principal (as in Interest-Only loans) or even worse owe more money than they did when they started (Neg-Am loans). He makes a good point about where the foreclosures are happening (not in mortgage hot spots as would be the case if it were a bubble), but that doesn't mean we're out of the woods because sometime in the next 5-10 years payments on the principal are going to start coming due. Hopefully it's not as bad as I fear it is.
Don't CAIR
Jane Galt
points to a case where CAIR (Council of American Islamic Relations) took what may or may not have been a justified legal case and pursued it in a manner to undercut actual American Islamic Relations.
28 March
Quote: Bring On Breaux
"If Breaux were to become our next governor, the message from voters would be clear: we are comfortable being at the bottom in almost every national ranking. If that's how Louisiana really feels, I'd like to know sooner, rather than later so I can know for sure if I'm wasting my time." -
Chad Rogers
Fearing Fred
Not sure what to make of this, but the liberals over at dKos seem to think that Thompson would be a
strong candidate.
27 March
Obama>Clinton?
According to
Rasmussen, possible GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson is "virtually tied" with Hillary Clinton but "trails Illinois Senator Barack Obama (D) by double digits". I'm not surprised by either of these results individually, but I'm really not sure what to make of them together. By and large Obama has not, to my knowledge, been significantly outperforming Clinton against Republican rivals.
Burning Bush
It never ceases to amaze me how
Ross Douthat and
Reihan Salam continue to portray Bush as the epitome of everything that's wrong with the Republican Party and call for the precise kinds of reforms that Bush has sought and failed to deliver because he lacked the requisite Republican support. I'm wondering if they've been living in the northeast too long and just feel the need to start any conversation with a disclaimer about Bush for fear of not being taken seriously otherwise. I can understand the impulse, but it undermines their case.
Quote: Culture Wars
"Culture war battles overwhelmingly involve the left throwing the first shot, then getting burned politically as the right fire back, and then winning the substantive battle." -
Matthew Yglesias. That about sums it up.
Subway Games
Sometimes half the fun of going to Subway is to see if they charge me for the extra cheese I ask for without prompting. The more crowded the place and the more people working the counter, the better your odds.
Bisquick
This greasy, grainy prole slop has spread across the nation's supermarkets like a fungal infection. Who buys this? And do they actually eat it?
26 March
Snuff Out?
As a general rule, no matter what the doctors say, remember that it is almost never a good idea to light something on fire and breathe in the smoke several times on a daily basis. The Independent apparently wrote
an apology for underestimating the potentially hazardous effects of cannabis. New studies have convinced them that the link between cannabis and schizophrenia is real and significant. They do maintain, however, that it should be decriminalized. If it turns out the scolds were right all along, that'd turn out to be a major drag.
Chastity
After reading Dawn Eden make the
religious case, Udolpho makes the unlikely
irreligious case for chastity.
More Congressmen, Please
I'm very sympathetic to the idea of
expanding the House of Representatives. As the non-deliberative body put into place to represent local attitudes and interests, I don't think it's possible for a congressman to represent over half a million people. Of course, in my perfect world being a congressman would be a part-time job done via the Internet, but I don't expect that to happen any time soon.
Rxepublican Medicine
Kim Strassel runs down
GOP options on health care. This is the main issue I'm going to be voting for on the next couple of elections. Republicans are going to have to come up with a more comprehensive solutions than HSAs in order to put the issue away as Clinton did with Welfare in the 90's. Right now my "worst case scenario" is expanding Medicare to everybody. I honestly think the best conservatives can hope for in the longer run is expanding federal employee benefits and more-or-less supplanting the employers' role in the current scheme.
22 March
Edwards '08 Onward
I was more impressed with Edwards when I thought that he was going to
drop out of the race earlier today, but I can't say that I blame him for
campaigning on despite the recurrance of his wife's cancer. Odds are better than not that he won't win the nomination, but I think Edwards is by far the most underestimated declared candidate in the race.
Music For Nuthin'
CD sales continue to lag and legal downloads are
failing to compensate. Anti-RIAA people will undoubtedly say that this wouldn't be if they just removed DRM. Then, when they do remove DRM and sales don't pick up, it'll be because the songs aren't cheap enough. Or their product sucks (even though people are downloading it). Or cause they're protesting the meanie-head temperament of the RIAA. Or any justification they can find to avoid the reality people are much less likely to pay for what they can get for free. I'm seriously no fan of the RIAA and their tactics do make it
easier to steal than to buy, but their concerns are very real. I really don't think that there are any easy answers in this debate.
21 March
Disenfranchising DC
It's not often, but every now and again I run across a law that I think is a good idea but is inherently unconstitutional. That's pretty much how I feel about the effort to give Washington DC
a vote in the House. I would support a Constitutional amendment to give them congressional representation, but congressional representation is pretty clearly reserved for the states.
20 March
Weight Watchers
I said a couple weeks ago that if Al Gore went on a diet it meant that he was running for president. Voila, he's
going on a diet, though I'm still not convinced. The rewards are, of course, examplary, but it's nonetheless an awfully big gamble to take. Better to be the man who "should have won" than the man who lost twice. Interesting, though, that so much of how the race is going to shape up depends on the decisions of two Tennesseans.
300 Assurances
It says more than a little about Hollywood that George Lucus would go out of his way to try to make the implausible claim of political overtones in Star Wars but writers and directors are often expected to
make assurances that movies that could be interpreted as politically conservative are not so. It's also fun to watch conservatives attempt to embrace any movie that isn't outright hostile to their politics.
15 March
No Class Still
Tom DeLay is apparently
going after Bush, Gingrich, Hastert, and Armey in his new book, calling them ineffectual betrayers of the conservative cause and blaming them for the lack of progress of the conservative movement. Such a tragedy that DeLay himself wasn't in a position of leadership to affect change...
12 March
Calling Captain Planet
I'm not a huge Transformers person, but it is nonetheless a betrayal of their cool to use their new movie as a
platform for environmentalism. It reminds me of when the Superman people couldn't decide which liberal cause to attach to the distruction of Krypton: environmentalism or nuclear proliferation. I wanna see a Hawkman movie wherein Thanagar is destroyed by licentiousness and moral decay, but I suspect that would get blocked as too moralizing.
02 January
Tax City, Texas
It's kinda sad to see Houston on the list of
51 most taxed cities. Houston is ranked pretty far down the list, but it's Texas's only representation on the list. You'd think that Austin would be on there.
01 January
Christian vs Christ-Follower
Someone did a parody of the Mac vs. PC ads using a "Christian" and a "Christ-follower" (
1,
2,
3,
4), the latter being positioned as the more entlightened of the two. It's a great concept, but the execution is somewhat lacking. I think there's room for some pointed (but humorous) commentary on the commercialization of Christ or the trend towards self-centered "look at me!" Christianity, but these videos don't deliver on that.
Covert Radicals
Scrappleface funnyman Scott Ott has a
worthwhile post with the contents of a back-and-forth with a San Fransisco news editor regarding government and private response to Katrina.
