Category: long story short

I admit it, Roy Moore scares me. I live in my west-coast bubble and he lives in his Alabama bubble and we both believe we have self-consistent world views and that there is something seriously wrong with the people who tend to overrule us. “What is he trying to do?” I asked B over breakfast,…

Just imagine the “Part of Tens” appendix.

Atrios makes a good point when he asks why the media isn’t jumping all over the Bush administration’s secrecy and evasiveness (when it comes to 9/11, energy commission, Plame, and so on): Come on media, it’s time to start framing the issue this way. Every time the Clintons failed to hand over Chelsea’s stool samples…

I’ve been toying on and off with commenting on the Dean/flag flap lately after seeing Zell “Why am I not a Republican” Miller on the Meet the Press this weekend deliberately misconstruing Dean’s (admittedly “dangerous”) statements about how he wants the votes of people who have confederate flags in their pickup trucks. Miller responded as…

Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine has chided others, including Josh Marshall (I doubt he’s aware of this weblog), for making a PC landgrab of the term terrorism by arguing that some of the anti-coalition attacks in Iraq have been guerilla actions or insurgencies rather than terrorism. I made this same argument myself, noting that a military…

Quoting Atrios verbatim: 7 Men Smile and Laugh as They Take Control of Your UterusAs members of congress look on, President Bush signs the Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2003 in Washington. [Eschaton] I should probably snag the photo and host it…

A fellow called scoffman just sent me a polite comment pointing out that his weblog, EdgeWise, has been around since May of 2003. While this blog has been around in one form or another since 2002, the fact is that we changed the name to Eddgewise just a month or so ago, without doing the…

A National Review article quoted in Eschaton says, among other things, “if my information is correct, the terrorists now have anti-tank weapons, which we may see in action in the near future.” It seems to me that people wielding antiaircraft missiles and anti-tank weapons against soldiers may be called insurgents or guerillas or even soldiers,…

Careful what you ask the oracle. You might not like the answer. I asked the Rune Caster today “Will it lift?” referring to a pall of gloom that’s beset me lately. The cast runes were encouraging: Past Isa – Cessation of energy, freezing an issue where it stands, cooling relationships, separation, division. Present Algiz –…

Oh wait, the check is a loan. Isn’t HFC, like, household finance or something? Now they just send you something that looks like a check and starts generating interest the moment you don’t put it through the shredder? Why don’t they just send me crack and get on with it?

Wow, I don’t seem 39. When did I get so old? This also marks the sixth anniversary of my first blog post (except we didn’t call them blogs back them, you young whippersnappers – it was more like an online diary). I can’t really claim six straight years of blogging, though, because there were two…

OK, I’m being facetious. Bush’s blatant lies (or disingenuous parsing of words, for the lawyers out there) about the photo-op “Mission Accomplished” banner, examined in the DNC’s Kicking Ass weblog, don’t stand up to the least bit of scrutiny, but of course it’s more of an embarassment and a problem for his team being pushed…

I don’t want to turn Edgewise into an all-Diebold-all-the-time weblog, but it seems that if we don’t plug the most obvious risks to election integrity, then any other efforts to make change will be for nothing. Dan Gillmor reports that Newsweek is now covering the issue: Steven Levy (Newsweek): Black Box Voting Blues. The best…

Others have complained about the way the Bush administration makes them start wanting to put on a tinfoil hat and join the conspiracy theorists. We’re reasonable people and we resent having to seriously consider some of these scary tales of potential voter-fraud. It’s bad enough if it’s already happened, but why does it seem so…

Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Electrolite has been hammering away at the Diebold voting machines issue recently. This seems to be another one of those slowly unfolding stealth scandals (like the profiteering by Halliburton in Iraq) that hasn’t yet come up with a hook that will make ordinary people see the danger. Who will tell the…

Counterspin Central puts forward an interesting take on the Howard Dean as McGovern meme.

For the last year or so Sebastian Holsclaw has been holding his own, debating liberals and leftists in the comment sections of many popular left-wing weblogs. Holsclaw has distinguished himself in his intellectual honesty and willingness to entertain nuances that transcend the talking points of the day. Now, Holsclaw has his own weblog where he…

Mark A. R. Kleiman has been following the tree-destruction/collective-punishment story from Iraq and says

Wesley Clark and Joe Lieberman bow out of the Iowa Caucuses to make room for Adam Felber.

We were in a kitchen, me and the two cops, one white and one black. The black one was Colin Powell. We sat down at the table and continued arguing about some system that would allow them to run background checks on people from their squad cars. The cops were against it, saying it would…

A week ago I read in the New York Times (“Republicans Debate Merits of Following Schwarzenegger to the Center”) about a bunch of conservative Republicans spinning Schwarzenegger’s election as a “fluke” (sounding like nothing so much as the spin of the mainstream Democrats here in California) and claiming that his pro-choice and other signal social-liberal…