"... who were shrewd enough to beat the slow, pompous Clintons in the mano-a-mano primaries but who seem like dazed lost lambs in the brave new world of federal legislation and global statesmanship." Camille Paglia wants heads to roll: Heads should be rolling at the White House for the embarrassing ...

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I am hearing a lot of carping lately about how Obama is going to raise taxes and is driving spending through the roof and tanking the economy. As Bill Maher recently said if “McCain had won the economy would be fine because Sarah Palin would still be shopping.”  Katie bar the door; the...

The main word that comes to mind upon reading the President's speech last night. (By the way, did he start on time? I turned the tube on at 10 pm and he was still going, yet I haven't heard anyone complain that he spoke for more than an hour, and the speech doesn't read that long.) Sleazy because he...

NCTE offers a recent report by Kathleen Blake Yancey on Writing in the 21st Century. Overall this is an interesting report and I am hopeful that it will spark some useful conversation in writing programs, English departments, and perhaps across campuses. Yancey ends with an identification of the cha...

So I like to think I’m generally up on all the new-fangled things. Take Twitter for example. I’ve had an account for awhile now. I even had followers. But I’ve just started using it. I’ve yet to figure out what I’ll really use it for. I’m thinking of using it to s...

I sympathize with Joe Mathews’ elegy for the local journalism that he says used to be practiced by the L.A. Times: When I don’t take the Times, I feel guilty. I worked there for eight years. I still contribute pieces regularly. It’s my hometown paper. But then I get the paper, read...

Andrew Sullivan went from being an astute conservative columnist to a frothing partisan hack somewhere around the 2004 elections. His latest column in The Sunday Times amply demonstrates his fall into hackery. Now, because the Republicans have the sheer audacity to defy the Leader and go against a b...

I was going to do a blog post a week or so ago titled Barack Obama is spamming me — you could sing it to this tune — but it was clear enough on the face of the email that a simple click would unsubscribe me from his email list, and since something stopped me from clicking, I could see I'd be lyi...

Shorter John Pilger: “Both parties are the same! Vote Nader!â€� (h/t O-Dub for inspiring the distillation, with pwofessional pwogressive thumb-sucker David Sirota providing the original purity mash.) To save y’all the trouble of ever having to suffer through a martyr-posing Pilger polemic ag...