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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I was sure I had already posted this, but apparently not…
It’s the definitive takedown of Sarah Palin made all the more so because it’s by a conservative former Reagan staffer, and because it appeared in the Wall Street Journal. 
It’s all good, but here’s a money passage:
” ‘[It’s said that] The elites hate her.” The elites made her. […]

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The writer Dave Eggers, in an interview in Salon:
“More than any other event in recent history, this exposed the quiet racism that’s right there under the surface, these assumptions.”
He was talking about Hurricane Katrina, but he might have been talking about the Sotomayor confirmation hearings.
They could have been a compelling snapshot of the politics of […]

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You may, with ardent surfing, find your live blogs on the Home Run Derby, or the Sotomayor confirmation hearings, or, oh, I dunno…. pro wrestling.
But I say without fear of contradiction that nowhere else, in the entire world wide interwebs, will you find all three in one place. We’re coming at you live from Chez Gross, […]

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Matt Yglesias blasts the bulls-eye on the pistol-packin ex-Governor.
Yglesias was working off a column by Ross Douthat, the New York Times’ new house conservative (and a gargantuan improvement over the last one, Bill Kristol). Douthat makes the point that Palin was worked over unfairly because of her class and gender:
Male commentators will attack you for […]

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It’s been a slow week, especially in sports….
Don’t know much about soccer. Don’t care much about soccer. So let’s equate this to other sports- Let’s say there was a country (we’ll call it Canada) that was trying to play American football at the highest level, and in the space of a few days Canada’s best football team beat the […]

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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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 on the economic mess.
Keynesian theory, in my limited understanding, holds that in bad economic times, when the people can’t spend money, the government has to, and therefore almost any economic stimulus is better than nothing.
That seems, um, extreme, but Chait makes a point I found compelling. World War II got us out of the Great […]

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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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