I live in Chicago, and our mass transit system, the CTA, is organized into "lines" of different colors: orange, green, purple, etc. Maybe I'm biased because I live a couple of blocks from one of its stops, but in my opinion all the other colored lines are bullshit compared to the Red Line. Catching the … Continue reading Red, Red Line

Full confession: this was going to be about Howie Kurtz and his courageous effort not to let being completely wrong about a story detract from the truthiness of the story itself, but then the Daily Beast, in a rare and tantalizing hint that somebody there has a clue, up and canned his ass. Not much … Continue reading you get a cookie! part 7 of ???: michael o’hanlon

Way back in 2006, Matt Yglesias formulated the "Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics" (can't find his original, but go here instead), which he applied to a number of pundits who seemed to believe that the only thing preventing Iraq from being a smashing success was a lack of will on America's part. Named after the … Continue reading Positing the “underpants gnomes theory of punditry” (UPDATED)

Is it possible that we've been overthinking The Conservative Mind all this time? Got that? With all other factors being equal, conservatives were less likely to buy the exact same lightbulb if you told them it would help the environment. They didn't have any more aversion to buying energy-saving lightbulbs than anyone else, unless the … Continue reading how many assholes we got on this ship, anyhow?

Sounds like an Indiana Jones movie, right? Or maybe a half-hour cartoon? About a week ago archaeologists in Turkey claimed to have discovered the tomb of Nasreddin, a heavily fictionalized character in medieval Middle Eastern and Central Asian literature. Nasreddin Hoca, or Mulla Nasruddin, or Nasreddin Efendi, or any of the many other ways he's … Continue reading The tomb of the Wise Fool

So it looks like Bashar al-Assad has used chemical weapons against rebel forces in Syria. President Obama, having previously referred to the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian conflict as "a game changer," or a "red line," or some equally faux-macho vapidity, is understandably interested in letting all the facts come in before America … Continue reading what is to be done about syria?

Earlier today, NBA center Jason Collins became the first male athlete in any of the four major North American sports leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL, which is somehow included in this list despite the fact that, and I say this as a huge hockey fan, you know). Most of the reaction was positive and … Continue reading you get a cookie! part 6 of ???: tim brando

It looks like it might be time for another edition of "what some folks out there are saying": It has been suggested by some that Fox News' Andrea Tantaros is actually a Reptiloid operative tasked with weakening public trust in media in advance of a full Reptiloid attack on the planet Earth. Obviously we here … Continue reading what some are saying

I'm trying to think of the right name for the peculiarly Beltway condition whereby the actual harm a politician does to countless numbers of people while in office can be countered by a story of the one time that politician showed basic human decency to one person in a way that didn't substantially change anything. … Continue reading should we call it “lanny davis disease”?

...it very likely looks something like this: A couple of weeks ago, we learned that the flagging news network is looking to revive Crossfire, the horror show of partisan bickering that it featured for more than two interminable decades beginning in the early 1980s. When Jon Stewart went on the show in late 2004 and … Continue reading when a “news” network trolls the world