Alessandra Stanley has an odd piece in the New York Times about the recent spate of "women behaving badly" shows, which she claims are demeaning to women. I haven't seen the shows in question, and given the description I'm persuaded that they're bad television. Parts of...
General
Among Katha Pollitt's many enviable talents is the ability to cut to the heart of an issue by saying something that by all rights should be banal, but is often.
Via Crooked Timber I learn of a plagiarist suing a university for not explaining to him that plagiarism is wrong. His defense seems to be that since he wasn't caught early.
Via Digby, we find Rep. Tom Davis (R, VA) indulging in demographic fantasies: If you take out the Indian reservation, we would have won," said Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), former chairman of the NRCC. Those damn traitorous Democrats! The audacity! They should be trying to win...
Kevin Drum with an excellent post on Oil. Upshot: Prices are going up. Fluctuations aside, they're not going back down. Depending on who you ask, production has peaked in the last.
Now that's a game. Why this country prefers the dreary postseason of the NBA is beyond me. I'm also grateful to Sports Illustrated for confidently declaring that a Tampa Bay victory.
I should make clear that I don't consider those who gamble on political events to have any special insights, as dsquared at crooked timber has demonstrated. In general the numbers in the Iowa markets andtradesports are at best a distillation of conventional wisdom. For fun,...
Everyone's all over poll numbers for the Presidential election, and everyone's watching the Senate pretty closely as well. (Speaking of which, there is a nice and very flattering profile of Barak Obama.
The ongoing Canadian election is fascinating from a political junkies standpoint, as it seems as if the reborn Conservative party could capture a plurality government, and it is unlikely that.
Via the incomparable Bob Somerby, this gem from Boston Globe typist Nina Easton on The Tweety Matthews Show ("complacent millionaire pundit values on a cable-access budget!"): EASTON: There is--there's no doubt that that's a piece of John Kerry. There's a piece of John Kerry that wants to please...
The Democrats are +1 in the House, with Stephanie Herseth having won. Good news--if there's anything better than a Democratic Congressperson, it's a hot Democratic Congressperson. Picking up a seat in.
In one of the least surprising developments in legal history, the recent federal act criminalizing D&E abortions was struck down in federal courts. This was inevitable, because the law directly contradicted.