I really don’t get what’s so gruesome about this video:

If you don’t have time to watch the 3 minute video, it goes something like this: dead turkey gets pulled out, and a minute later a guy sticks a live turkey in upside down. The live turkey thrashes around once or twice. It’s not like there’re [...]

Matt Yglesias thinks that conservative opponents of the Big 3 Bailout are more worried about the liability of pensions on the car companies than executive pay. And he’s probably right. Because the pension costs of GM and the rest are crushing those companies. Let’s look at GM.
GM has a CEO who, in 2007, made $15.7 [...]

I must admit to some perverse amusement at the fact that Joe Lieberman is holding onto his committee chairmanship, if only because Kos thinks this is cause enough to primary a sitting majority leader. Here’s what I honestly don’t understand, however: the claim that Lieberman is some sort of knuckle dragging right winger. Writes Ezra:
Lieberman’s [...]

Looks like the government is giving up trying to regulate the online poker industry. I might have to fire up my long-dormant PokerStars account and give it a test run. Things have probably changed a little over the last two years.
h/t to Jacob Sullum

One of the things that supporters of the GM/Ford/Chrysler bailout say is that it’s not fair to blame unions for the unprofitability of cars. Yes, their labor costs make them unaffordable, but the UAW has made so many concessions. It’s unfair to ask them to give up anything else.
I pretty much accepted this criticism, seeming [...]

Personally, being somewhat jealous and envious of Richard’s song-writing and guitar-playing, it is somewhat satisfying that he has not yet achieved household-name status. It serves him right for being so good.
-David Byrne

Watch Richard Thompson - Beeswing in Music Videos |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Lots of interesting discussion in the comments. A little circular, but that tends to happen when people are posting repeatedly on the same topic in the middle of the day when they should be more focused on work.
I am interested to see what people make of this story (via Rod), of a Mormon woman who gave [...]

John Kass at the Chicago Tribune writes about a middle schooler in Oak Park, IL who conducted an experiment in political tolerance:
She noticed that fellow students at Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama for president. His campaign kept preaching “inclusion,” and she decided to see how included she could be.
So just before the [...]

Conor is tired of people like Freddie saying that conservatives don’t care about the human cost of letting Detroit’s Big Three fail; as is his wont, Freddie replies in the comments writing that
It’s incredible to me that you would invoke McArdle on this. She has one response and one emotional context when she condemns thousands [...]

The eminent Mr. Schwenkler:
So congratulations, America. Our long national nightmare is over, and now we’ve got a president-elect who apparently goes in for spying on his citizens, torturing his enemies, expanding the military, violating the sovereignty of our allies, threatening to attack Iran, providing effectively unconditional support to Israel, keeping massive residual forces in Iraq [...]

I have a serious, simple question to ask:
Why are we even considering bailing out American automakers? Why are people like Freddie so vociferous in their support of handing out billions of dollars to GM and the rest?
I’m honestly quite confused. It doesn’t really make much sense to me. Their arguments appear to come down to [...]

Now, I don’t want to accuse Andrew of advocating a blacklist–he specifically declares the artistic director of Sacramento’s Musical Theatre should not be fired for supporting Proposition 8–but this post feels awfully sympathetic toward some kind of blacklist. Isn’t one of the joys of America that we can work with people with whom we disagree [...]

I know writing headlines for CNN Living can be boring. But the next time you have the urge to use the word “Bling” in a headline, please watch this.
And then let it die.

The fine Mr. Kennelly points us to one of the most awfully sanctimonious responses to criticism I’ve ever read. Kmiec’s reply to Ross’s post is really something to behold; like Daniel, I also went back to read Ross’s original harrangue under the assumption that I had missed Ross calling Kmiec a child rapist or some [...]

Or Bush administration sticking them with it? The New York Times reports (advance from tomorrow’s International Herald Tribune):
WASHINGTON: The United States military since 2004 has used broad, secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, according to senior American officials.
These military [...]

A coin toss has determined the winner of the mayor’s race in the tiny northwestern Minnesota town of Goodridge.
Democracy at work, ladies and gentlemen!

As a Republican who favors keeping abortion legal AND overturning Roe v. Wade, I’m not sure I have a dog in the Douthat/Kmiec dustup over at Slate. But you’ve got to read Douthat’s takedown. Some representative lines:
What I don’t understand at all is Kmiec’s position, which seems to be that the contemporary Democratic Party, and [...]

It occurs to me that no reference to Nicholas Cage can be made without mentioning this utterly insane montage of him beating up women in The Wicker Man. Judging by Youtube, there is practically a cottage industry devoted to cataloguing these scenes:

Is Obama an alpha male? Roissy examines.

Michael Crichton has died, after a lengthy (and private) battle with cancer. This makes me quite sad: I stumbled onto Crichton’s work in middle school and found it most entertaining. To your average 11 year old, the cardboard cutouts who inhabited his pages were pluses, not minuses. Those who criticize his stilted prose and one-dimensional [...]