Month: November 2004

How odd that just after analyzing the claim that Bush voters are physical abusers (with Kerry voters as their victims) I see direct evidence to the contrary: a report of Kerry supporters attacking Bush supporters for allegedly being…. gay! I am absolutely not making this up. Tough as it is to do, I’m trying to…

Via Megan McArdle’s pointer to Kevin Drum, I found myself drawn to and mesmerized by this post, written by a self-described “advocate for victims of domestic abuse” who “draws some parallels between her work and the reaction of many Democrats to the election”: Hear the cacophony of voices, crying out, ?Why did they beat me??…

The 112th Carnival of the Vanities is up at Bob Hayes’ excellent new blog, Let’s Try Freedom. The theme for this week’s carnival is “Things Having Nothing To Do With Partisan Politics,” and my post has nothing to do with the theme (nor do about half the disobedient entries). Bob does a great job with…

Secession? A blue state idea? (Above meme compilation by Glenn Reynolds.) Why, the way some of these folks talk, you’d almost think it was their idea. Hardly. Then or now. And how are they going to divvy up the turf when it looks like this? Impossible to secede. They’d have to intercede.

I’ve been a little down lately, as so many of us have. It’s on account of the election. Not for the usual reasons, though. Oh no. See, I made my mom cry by voting for George Bush. Looking back, perhaps I should have lied about it. She never tried to conceal her loathing for the…

Is there more to this post election period than Republican triumphalism, Democratic wound-licking, and the usual arguments? Stuff has been making me think that there is. Stuff like “bink’s” earlier comment. Like a letter I received from a friend (excerpt below). Like the tone of general conversations with liberal friends around here. And like this…

While Dennis beat me to Carville’s carcass, there are a few bones left for me to pick. According to James Carville, the Republicans were elected because they ran with the following winning “narrative”: we’re going to protect you from the terrorists in Tikrit and from the homos in Hollywood. Really? I never felt threatened by…

James Carville on the way things are: “We can deny this crap, but I’m out of the denial. I’m about reality here,” Mr. Carville told reporters at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. “We are an opposition party, and as of right now, not a particularly effective one. You can’t deny reality here.”…

In an earlier post, (“None dare call it fascism“), I reacted to the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by an Islamic extremist. More recently, Glenn Reynolds noticed that Michael Moore was strangely silent about the murder (after all, they’re both directors). I wondered too, but I assumed anyone who’d consider fellow filmmakers who…

Eric Engberg at CBSNews takes the infantile blogosphere to task in a specious display of pseudo-journalism. By his logic ‘newspapers’ qua newspapers can be judged by sampling the Weekly World News and the Daily Mirror. All food tastes terrible if we can judge by a British menu, and thus the blogosphere is inherently flawed because…

We only lost by three and a half million! — Michael Moore There we go again. The word “we” has an ugly habit of sneaking its way into political discussions, with an almost hypnotic tendency to induce people of good will (or people who don’t enjoy debating) to imagine themselves in the same ideological group…

Much as I like Professor Bainbridge, I have to confess to a little disppointment with his repeated characterization of those who disagree with him [presumably myself included] as “chirping sectaries.” First because I am sick of labels, and second, because it’s not his label — which means I have to spend time reading the thoughts…

The 70 degree November weather was just too good to spend at the computer all day, so Puff and I played hookey by spending it at the beach in Ocean City, New Jersey. So few people were there it was downright spooky. The above was taken at Corson’s Inlet, a small beach abutting a wild…

An organization called PIPA (the Program on International Policy Attitudes) seems to be at the center of defining the word “reality” as it is used in the term “Reality Based Community.” PIPA’s Director, Steven Kull, described as “a political psychologist specializing in the study of public and elite attitudes on public policy issues” has this…

On Thursday, Puff saw his old girlfriend Emily in the park. He’s getting pretty old (nearly 15 — ancient for a large dog) and seeing her really lifted his spirits. Here’s how Puff looked this afternoon, basking on a sort of lovers rock near the Schuylkill River. (Initials carved in the rock date back to…

I was fascinated to read about Kerry’s assiduous, almost obsessive courtship of John McCain: Kerry’s courtship of Senator John McCain to be his running mate was longer-standing and more intense than previously reported. As far back as August 2003, Kerry had taken McCain to breakfast to sound him out to run on a unity ticket.…

Once again E. at the Dave has the scoop — this time digging up a site which exposes Karl Rove’s Fascist Plot!

Slightly more than half of the citizens of this country simply do not care about what those of us in the “reality-based community” say or believe about anything. — Eric Alterman Only slightly more than half? How many Americans have ever heard the expression “reality-based community” — much less know what it means? I’d say…

I was first alerted to the rhetorical use of irony at Slate when E. at the Dave pointed me toward Christopher Hitchens’s non-endorsement of John Kerry. Slate missed the irony and made it an endorsement, but have since apologized for the error. It seems that they’ve come a long way since, having learned to master…

Stephen Bainbridge takes the view that libertarians just don’t understand the value of morality (link via Glenn Reynolds), and here he expands upon his point: As long as large-L Libertarians refuse to contemplate the prospect that law may reflect any moral norms other than a radical individual autonomy, they will remain a fringe element in…