Internal Monologue

UPDATE: Dude, he's a Unitarian ! I love it when people from my little religion are in the news! Note that not all Unitarians are atheists. It so happens that Rep. Stark is both. Also, I identify as a "Unitarian Universalist", rather than just "Unitarian" because I joined after the Unitarians and Universalists merged. Many people who were part of one church or the other before the merge call themselves "Unitarian" or "Universalist" rather than "Unitarian Universalist." Great news for those of us championing the cause of unbelievers (the most scorned group , if recent polls are to be believed) in American politics: Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) has come out as a non-theist. Here's the Secular Coalition for America (whom I did not know existed until now): There is only one member of Congress who is on record as not holding a god-belief. Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.), a member of Congress since 1973, acknowledged his nontheism in res

Kos : The Sunday Morning talk shows, when confronted with their objective conservative bias (more of them, less of us), responded that it was only natural since Republicans controlled all branches of government. Now that Democrats control Congress, Republicans still dominate the Sunday Morning talk shows .

Of course, author Laura Sessions is only worried about what hooking up does to women . Men are presumably immune to the bad psychological ju-ju accumulated by less than long-term coupling. Ann Friedman pans Sessions' latest book (HT: Feministing ): She fails to show how women lose when they “delay love.” This would seem to be an equally important part of Stepp’s argument—after all, she claims that casual hookups have a negative effect on young women’s lives beyond the morning after. And yet Stepp devotes only one skimpy chapter to what happens after graduation to girls who’ve enjoyed a lot of hookups in college. Perhaps the most important part of her argument, that this behavior damages girls’ ability to form serious and lasting relationships later in life, isn’t even weakly supported in her final chapters. She mentions, but casually dismisses, experts like Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University who “suggests that most college graduates become serious a

Via Sullivan , we have this bit of fun frivolity. Here's a sample:

Weisberg on Slate via rubberhose : ...the war was a mistake . American soldiers...are victims as much as "heroes." ... lives lost in Iraq have been lives wasted . ...America is losing or has already lost the Iraq war . The Weisberg article is a lot more than just a list of these four things and is worth a quick read. These are things that politicians have a hard time saying in public, because they violate the mandatory optimism of current American political discourse. They also seem to open one up to charges of "not supporting the troops", which seems to be the political equivalent of infant cannibalism or something. Let's hope we can get over these fears and start dealing with reality.

Here's tomorrow's New York Times lead editorial , via mcjoan on Kos : During the hearing on his nomination as attorney general, Alberto Gonzales said he understood the difference between the job he held — President Bush’s in-house lawyer — and the job he wanted, which was to represent all Americans as their chief law enforcement officer and a key defender of the Constitution. Two years later, it is obvious Mr. Gonzales does not have a clue about the difference. He has never stopped being consigliere to Mr. Bush’s imperial presidency. If anyone, outside Mr. Bush’s rapidly shrinking circle of enablers, still had doubts about that, the events of last week should have erased them.... We opposed Mr. Gonzales’s nomination as attorney general. His résumé was weak, centered around producing legal briefs for Mr. Bush that assured him that the law said what he wanted it to say. More than anyone in the administration, except perhaps Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Gonzales symbolize

I love it when people more prominent than me say something that I said after I already said it. In this case, it's Yglesias (via Atrios ): Through no fault of anyone's in the military, meanwhile, the administration has managed to become totally confused about our objectives in the region, where we're no longer sure if we're fighting Iran or al-Qaeda, if we're encouraging or discouraging sectarian conflict, if we favor Sunnis or Shiites. Under the circumstances, we can't possibly be brokering a viable political settlement; we don't even know what our goals are. Though I must admit the American Prospect story linked to in the quote pre-dates my post by almost 2 weeks and says essentially the same thing: Apparently, at some point American foreign policy descended from "seemingly deluded" to "explicitly deluded" and nobody took note. Ignatius, obviously prizing access over good sense, managed only to meekly note that "the realignme