Internal Monologue

If you read the lead editorial in the paper version today's New York Times , you would have come across this shocking line: House Democrats distinguished themselves this week when they stood up to the White House’s latest military funding steamroller: approving only $50 million of the additional $196 million the president requested for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their editorials need an editor. If Bush only asked for $196 million for wars, Congress would give it to him no problem. And no one who knows anything about military budgets would describe such a paltry sum as a "funding steamroller". Of course, the editorial writers meant to say "billion", not "million". That they could make such a mistake is truly frightening. A billion is nothing like a million. In fact, a billion is what you get when you take a thousand millions and add them together. It's like mistaking gallon jug for a shot glass. (Here's a good post from Dean Baker on innu

I support the striking writers. They should get something from Internet sales. It may be hard to make money on the net, but that doesn't mean the writers shouldn't get a cut of what money does get made. It should be just like any other distribution channel. In fact, this whole divvying things up by distribution channel is weird. They're all merging together, but old arrangements are slow to adapt. Why don't they just get some small cut of the take, regardless of medium? As an actor, I run into this weirdness every time I try to explain to someone the different jurisdictions of SAG and AFTRA : SAG is film, and AFTRA is TV and radio. But some TV is SAG if it's shot on film or if it meets some other weird criteria. Some "industrials" (in-house corporate videos used for training, promotion, or other purposes) are SAG and some aren't. It's all very abstruse. Anyway, via Eschaton , we have this funny look at some classic movie lines as if they had b

Reagan speaking at the Neshoba County fair in 1980. Image from the Neshoba County Fair website . David Brooks recently penned a column in which he claimed that Reagan mentioning "state's rights" in a speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi (site of three infamous murders of civil rights workers) was not a coded appeal to racists: Still, the agitprop version of this week — that Reagan opened his campaign with an appeal to racism — is a distortion, as honest investigators ranging from Bruce Bartlett, who worked for the Reagan administration and is the author of “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,” to Kevin Drum, who writes for Washington Monthly, have concluded. Well I don't know about Bartlett, Kevin Drum doesn't exactly exonerate Reagan . Indeed, he calls Reagan's speech "a genuine blight on his record" and says Reagan deserves criticism for it and that Reagan's civil rights record was "pretty abomi

I suppose it would work: Why you comin' home At five in the morn? Something's going on. Can I smell yo dick? Don't play me like a fool Cuz that ain't cool What you need to do is Let me smell yo dick! (via RazzyBlog )

Democrats should close the "carried interest" loophole that allows hedge fund managers to get taxed at 15% while the rest of us get taxed much higher. Unfortunately, hedge fund managers give a lot of money to Democrats and that buys influence. Matt Yglesias asks why Republicans don't shame Democrats into closing the loophole. It would be a pretty easy way to score some political points and show how the Democrats are in hock to narrow moneyed interests. Kevin Drum responds : Silly Matt. Virtually every Republican in Congress has signed — using the blood of their first-born child — Grover Norquist's anti-tax pledge. Everyone knows that "closing a loophole" is just crafty liberalspeak for "increasing your taxes," so voting to tax hedge fund managers at normal rates would cause all pledge-abiding members of the GOP caucus to explode. Or, in any case, open them up to Grover Norquist saying mean things about them. Besides, you know the old saying. &qu

Engineering seems to be the field of choice for many Islamic terrorists. Why? This paper , by Oxford Sociologists Gambetta and Hertog, tries to figure it out. Here's the abstract: We find that graduates from subjects such as science, engineering, and medicine are strongly overrepresented among Islamist movements in the Muslim world, though not among the extremist Islamic groups which have emerged in Western countries more recently. We also find that engineers alone are strongly over-represented among graduates in violent groups in both realms. This is all the more puzzling for engineers are virtually absent from left-wing violent extremists and only present rather than over-represented among right-wing extremists. We consider four hypotheses that could explain this pattern. Is the engineers’ prominence among violent Islamists an accident of history amplified through network links, or do their technical skills make them attractive recruits? Do engineers have a ‘mindset’ that makes t

Orcinus wonders why this hasn't gotten the same attention that the Catholic Church's scandal has: And so here it is -- in the form of hundreds of young women and men coming forward to tell their stories to judges and juries, exposing a decades-long pattern of unchecked predatory behavior on the part of their Baptist pastors. This parade, too, has gone on nearly non-stop and just as fast for nearly a year now -- so where are the reporters, the cameras, the headlines? A few national papers have picked up on this, as has ABC's 20/20 (which did a report in April). Among bloggers, the perspicacious Pam Spaulding has been on the case. But mostly, the coverage has been confined to the local papers -- each one treating its own hometown pastor scandal as an isolated incident, without putting it in the context of a larger national trend. As long as the dots aren't being connected, this isn't getting anything like the 24/7/365 coverage that the Catholic scandal did. We ha