Billy Paultz Reconsidered

The health care “debate” has become so inane and dense with bull***t that I’m resisting the urge to write something big and comprehensive about it, lest my head explode, indeed lest it explode because I cut a hole in the door of a microwave oven and stuck my head in, a la J. O. Incandenza […]

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of the New York Times delivers a dispatch from the frontier of the gay-marriage debate. To summarize: the last (hopefully, maybe) big barricade of American bigotry is slowly, inevitably being knocked down.
No surprise there. The great Nate Silver predicts a majority of Americans will favor gay marriage within the next 10 years or so.
What I was […]

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I’ve tried to stay away from politics for a while now because…. I’m not sure, exactly. Maybe I wanted to avoid a big, sloppy omnibus thing about Obama that would be embarrassing in retrospect.
But I can’t keep quiet any longer about one thing: Naming Hillary Secretary of State is an awful, horrible, insane idea on […]

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Perhaps the most important and influential space on the Internet is the “front page’’ of the Drudge Report. About two weeks ago, the lead item on that page was the following (typically blazing) headline: “2001 OBAMA: TRAGEDY THAT ‘REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH’ NOT PURSUED BY SUPREME COURT.”
The reference is to an interview Obama did with […]

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Two of my favorite journalists are Michael Kinsley and Christopher Hitchens, Kinsley because of his calm, relentlessly logical parsing of bullcrap, and Hitchens because he’s almost always either brilliant or hilariously insane or both.
Anyway, each of them has a fine dissection of campaign nonsense currently on Slate. Kinsley on John McCain making lack of experience […]

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I seem to remember, as a child, being sort of fascinated by the political conventions.
Now I find them sad and embarrassing. Part of that is the proliferation of media removing the novelty from all things. Part of it is your correspondent getting old. But the most important part is the endlessly depressing fact that politics […]

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The Phils and Blue Jays are evidently in serious talks about A.J. Burnett. I’ll be looking for Blue Jays scouts (Jim Fregosi?) when I go to Reading to watch Brett Myers pitch Saturday. Reading has some legit prospects, but since the Big Club’s catchers are a 35 year-old and Carlos Ruiz, I’d strongly advise against […]

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