These sublimely clueless musings from Lisa Schiffern at the Corner illustrate the strange belief system of the GOP's true ideological base, which is made up mostly of the American version of what Orwell called "the lower upper class." Axioms which are key to that system include: (1) The hardest-work...

One of my favorite bits of right-wing nonsense is the meme being replicated on the internets by Glenn Reynolds et. al. this morning about how the problem with taxing high income earners is that they won't "work hard" if they have to give more of their money to shiftless people who don't "work hard" ...

I've just read (actually re-read -- first time was about 20 years ago) Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon, his 1932 study of the Spanish bullfight. There's a lot of interesting stuff in the book, even if you have no interest in bullfighting per se, and the man certainly writes beautifully when he's ...

The more one looks into this topic the more obvious it becomes that a concept like "normal weight" is so sociologically complex as to be practically meaningless. A couple of further notes: One thing the fat police love to say when it's pointed out that the entire overweight range and much of the obe...

Debates about the meaning of "terrorism" often feature some odd assumptions, including: (1) Killing 500 civilians while making some attempt to avoid killing them is less morally problematic than killing five civilians while attempting to kill many more. I suppose this may be true, but it hardly seem...

Since my beloved Michigan Wolverines just suffered their first really bad season since the Johnson administration, I've discovered that what fans do in this situation is review highlights from glorious seasons gone by. Watching this replay of Desmond Howard's fourth-down catch against Notre Dame, I'...

This is the weirdest coaching switch I've ever seen: Auburn fires Tommy Tuberville, who prior to this year had gone 42-9 in the SEC over the previous four seasons, including a perfect record in 2004, and replaces him with Gene Chizik, whose entire head coaching record consists of going 5-19 at Iowa ...

It's being reported that Notre Dame is going to bring back Charlie Weis for a fifth season, despite the fact the team racked up the most losses in any two-season stretch in the 109-year history of the program in Weis's third and fourth years. Weis's record is, by any reasonable measure, worse than t...

I guess this kind of thing is what makes the world go around on some level. And so the Black Friday lines begin. The streets of Boulder are fairly tame and the majority of store-fronts are dark on Thanksgiving evening. However, at this point in time, about 30 people have set up camp in front of Boul...

Sandy Levinson, a professor of law and political science, has been arguing for several years now that academics pay way too much attention, relatively speaking, to the rights provisions of the Constitution, and not nearly enough to what he calls its hard-wired structural features. One reason this is...