Heh. Looks like I’m not the only one who noticed the off-putting preachiness of last year’s Hollywood crop. Even a liberal — sorry “liberal,” as we’re putting the word in scare quotes now till we know for sure the subject’s attitude toward Locke and David Lloyd George — such as Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir has a [...]

Just when I was lamenting the lack of a new equivalent of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, comes a timely manifesto, “Together facing the new totalitarianism.”

After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism.
We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the [...]

Gentlemen, it is said, prefer blondes. So did cavemen.

Almost the only sustenance in northern Europe came from roaming herds of mammoths, reindeer, bison and horses. Finding them required long, arduous hunting trips in which numerous males died, leading to a high ratio of surviving women to men.
Lighter hair colours, which started as rare [...]

Looks like the forces waging the war over Roe are digging the trenches for another (final?) battle. South Dakota is on the verge of all but banning abortion, a move that will almost certainly spawn a case that is appealed to the Supreme Court. To people like South Dakota State Representative Roger Hunt, this move [...]

He thinks that most voters are ‘monomodal’, while the current political climate in Washington is ‘bimodal.’
To translate, a third party candidate could cause a lot of headaches in the next election.
Political Wire has more.

That’s the tragic aftermath of sectarian violence in Iraq over the past several days.
I can’t help but think that civil war is much closer than we may think. Only a few of those who were taken by this latest tragedy need to be “important” people. And any one of those few could be the catalyst. [...]

In 1999, the government began secretly reclassifying documents that were previously made public by the Clinton administration.
One such document is the 1958 Department of Defense Emergency Plans Book. Washington Wire describes it as “an early Cold War description of response planning for a nuclear attack on the U.S”.
However, you want to know the truly ironic [...]

Maybe it has something to do with last names that start with “Mc” or maybe it had to do with being a former press secretary, but Mike McCurry is certainly feeling Scott McClellan’s pain.
From the NY Times:
Mike McCurry, who was President Bill Clinton’s press secretary a decade ago, is kicking himself to this day for [...]

Yes, an expected post from a liberal, but I think this illustrates just how much the port controversy blindsided Bush. Sure, we can’t know if this number is true until we see other numbers come in the next few days, but this walks and talks a lot like post-Katrina numbers. Bush has got to be [...]

What do you expect from a blog that calls itself Right-Wing Nut House? Well, surprise yourself. Much of what you see there probably matches your expectation. But how about a heartfelt paean to the hero of the blogger’s youth, Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr.?
Didn’t see that one coming, perhaps. Unless you recall the politics of the [...]

OK, all you political junkies, here’s a bone to chew on. Arianna cheerfully admits to, and explains, Bush Derangement Syndrome.
Kurtz: All right. Let me stick with the media and the vice president. Arianna, I’m sure you’d like to respond to this notion that you’re suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome.
Huffington: Well, absolutely. First of all, [...]

“Only Nixon can go to China,” as the old Vulcan proverb goes. Nixon’s ruthless soulmate Henry Kissinger, that old Vulcan, somehow manages to get through this WaPo op-ed without typing “only Hamas can make peace with Israel.” But the phrase hovers over all.

The advent of Hamas brings us to a point where the peace process [...]

Minxin Pei, the China hand at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writing in Foreign Policy, predicts “China’s future will be decay, not democracy.”

China’s economic performance since 1979, for example, is actually less impressive than that of its East Asian neighbors, such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, during comparable periods of growth. Its banking [...]

Ken Livingstone is an arse of the first water. Among his many verbal outrages, he once said he looks forward to the Bush Administration being “overthrown” the way Saddam was. So it makes me grimace to have to lock arms and stand in solidarity with him, but I have no choice. My principles allow no [...]

I’m sorry…he smears so called “liberals”:
Despite the clearly desperate desire of some to believe that civil war is on the horizon, my sense is that we won’t see a civil war. This will undoubtedly disappoint and infuriate a lot of so-called “liberals” in the U.S. and Europe almost as much as it will infuriate and [...]

Fear is not respect. Fear is fear. So just say it.

And I’m almost certain he’s actually writing it. There’s too much original content on there for it not to be. And by the way, the content is pretty damn good too, if you enjoy reading an insider’s perspective on the music industry.
Here are some of his thoughts on the guilt by association game reporters are [...]

I hear ya fellow Democrats:
Democrats, after 11 years as the minority party in Congress, still can’t get it right with their own voters, a poll shows.
By objecting to virtually every initiative and proposal of the Bush administration and congressional Republican majority, Democrats are undermining their party’s chances of regaining the majority this fall, the John [...]

Yes, the Senate in SD voted for eliminating abortion rights, and by nearly a 2-1 margin:
PIERRE, S.D. (AP) â€â€? South Dakota moved closer to imposing some of the strictest limits on abortion in the nation as the state Senate approved legislation that would ban the procedure except when the woman’s life is in danger.
The bill, [...]

To civil war? To a stronger national unity?
To explain…
If you haven’t heard yet, one of the holiest Shi’ite mosques was attacked by insurgents. And since some Shi’ites think the Sunnis did it, they’ve attacked their mosques. Tit for tat, even though it’s not really clear that the Sunnis did anything at all. That’s the [...]