Yesterday’s official blog kerfuffle was Orin Kerr’s complaint about Kieran Healy’s politically-minded Memorial Day item on Crooked Timber, which led to a half-hearted “Do it to Julia!” directed back at this very site. (All. Together. Now! We kid! Because! We love!)
Seems to me that Kerr and Kieran’s other critics are missing a major point of […]

After George Galloway’s Senate testimony I challenged his opponents to impeach him on the facts if they could. Clinton W. Taylor and George Gooding have done at least a partial job of just that, using the Internet Wayback Machine to examine archived versions of Galloway’s Mariam Appeal website. My own limited experience with the […]

President Bush calls Amnesty International’s report on our deliberate, systemic employment of torture, direct or outsourced, against prisoners either in our various bolt holes or the dungeons of cooperative tyrannies “absurd.” Vice-President Cheney avers that he is “offended” by the report. The Washington Post and two million warbloggers think the biggest scandal is that Amnesty […]

Mark Felt. This is one of those required blogging topics, right? Well I just blogged about it.
Admit it, though: we were all hoping for somebody more famous.
UPDATE: Okay, who should it have been? I think the coolest would have been Pat Buchanan. That would have made people’s heads freaking spin.

Much talk today about the Human Events list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.” Let me state right off the bat that I don’t think the concept of “harmful book” is inherently ridiculous. Someone, whether William Dean Howells or Mayor Jimmy Walker, once said that “No young girl was […]

Extraordinarily useful primer by Emily Bazelon, Phillip Carter, and Dahlia Lithwick in Slate. Also, a comprehensive, measured J’Accuse at QandO. See also, and also.

Inadequate thanks are the only kind we have to offer those who gave “the last full measure of devotion” in service to the country. We the living, and we civilians, should be mindful that every one of those deaths betokened an awesome act of trust - trust that, when they made themselves into weapons, […]

Some recent superhero comics, quickly (though I always say that) recapped:
Marvel Knights Spider-Man, by Hudlin, Tan and Sibal. This issue reveals last issue as Reginald Hudlin’s Spider-Man shakeout cruise - it had its entertaining bits but the ending was so off in tone from the rest of the book as to ruin the whole thing. […]

The article of the day is Susan B. Glasser’s story for the Washington Post on possible shifts in American anti-terror policy. As the lede puts it:
The Bush administration has launched a high-level internal review of its efforts to battle international terrorism, aimed at moving away from a policy that has stressed efforts to capture and […]

“The Argus,” some kind of California Bay-area paper with a web presence, runs an unsigned editorial fairly gushing in its support for restricting over-the-counter antihistamine sales. (Via Balloon Juice, who has useful links to articles on the absurdity of this approach to the crystal meth problem.)
I have a question: are we quite sure that the […]

I’m exhuming this from the Star Wars thread because it’s becoming a more general topic. Down-item, Gary Farber is attempting to uphold what is apparently called the “Expanded Universe” canon of Star Wars against viewers who think rather that they get to interpret the facts of Anakin Skywalker’s parentage for themselves with reference to intra-movie […]

Matthew Yglesias is right that, from the perspective of one libertarian value, Social Security is not nearly so bad as other government programs. It’s “big government” in terms of money, but it doesn’t involve intrusive micromanagement. Indeed, some partial-privatization schemes might make social security much bigger government in the regulatory sense.
From another libertarian perspective, social […]