Internal Monologue

Here's one from the not -The Onion bin: This ad, which Carly Fiorina is running against Tom Campell in her quest for the Republican nomination for US Senator from California, has to be one of the worst campaign ads ever. Chait : The funny thing about this ad, aside from the clumsy over-the-top quality, is the metaphor. The message of the ad is that Campbell is an ideological deviant. All the other Republicans signed Grover Norquist's no-taxes-ever pledge, but Campbell refused. Campbell went off on his own and made a budget deal in order to prevent a fiscal collapse. And what's the metaphor the ad uses? Sheep. But not in a disparaging way. The good politicians are sheep, doing what Grover Norquist tells them to do. Campbell, the ad tells us, is only pretending to be a sheep, but he's really a wolf. So vote for the sheep. The evil robot sheep doesn't appear until 2:26. But it's worth the wait, I assure you. UPDATE: The Fiorina campaign apparently thinks this

Remember back when Russia was invading Georgia, and I wondered why the Georgians hadn't shut off the Roki Tunnel that connected Russia to South Ossetia? Well, apparently the Bush administration discussed (and thankfully rejected) the possibility of doing this for them: With desperate Georgians begging for American help in closing down the key route through which Russian soldiers were pouring into the country, Bush’s national security aides outlined possible responses, including “the bombardment and sealing of the Roki Tunnel” and other “surgical strikes,” according to a new history of the conflict and independent interviews with former senior officials. I'm very glad we did not get into a direct military conflict with a nuclear superpower over a small territorial dispute in which no vital interests were at stake. I guess I have to say kudos to the Bush administration for making the right call on this. That's one war they did manage to avoid.

DailyKos commissioned Research 2000 to do a nationwide poll of self-identified Republicans. Many of them have a very different view of things than I do. Some examples: Do you think Barack Obama is a socialist? Yes 63 No 21 Not Sure 16 Oh dear. I guess "socialist" is Republican for "centrist establishment Democrat quite willing to have a former Goldman Sachs executive as his treasury secretary and to re-appoint George W. Bush's selection for Chair of the Federal Reserve." Do you believe Sarah Palin is more qualified to be President than Barack Obama? Yes 53 No 14 Not Sure 33 Obviously, we have different ideas of what qualifies one to be president. Do you believe your state should secede from the United States? Yes 23 No 58 Not Sure 19 Egad. 23% of Republicans want their state to secede from the Union? 19% aren't sure? Hammering out policy compromises with representatives of these folks is going to be rather difficult. It goes on. Now remem

A language preserved only in certain obsolete texts, whose more recent editions, though much clearer and better organized, have been drained of a sense of wonder. What a treat, to grow up reading text like this: The true splendor of the Vault can be appreciated only by those with infravision, or by use of the roseate lenses or a gem of seeing. The Vault is a strange anomaly, a hemispherical cyst in the crust of the earth, an incredibly huge domed fault over 6 miles long and nearly as broad. The dome overhead is a hundred feet high at the walls, arching to several thousand feet height in the center. When properly viewed, the radiation from certain unique minerals give the visual effect of a starry heaven, while near the zenith of this black stone bowl is a huge mass of tumkeoite -- which in its slow decay and transformation to lacofcite sheds a lurid gleam, a ghostly plum-colored light to human eyes, but with ultravision a wholly different sight. The small "star" nodes glow

As I once pointed out, messaging, instant and text, has replaced the phone call as the chief means by which teen-agers communicate their woes to other teen-agers—but if messaging had come along first, and the phone call just been announced by Steve Jobs a week ago, can anyone doubt the huge technological leap the phone call would present over the instant message? Real-time conversation! Hear your girlfriend’s every breath and sigh! Escape the tyranny of the keyboard for the roaming realm of the real voice! “Real Speech, Real Time, At Last The Real You,” Steve would say, and we would all be rocking in his wake. - Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker

UPDATE: More at boingboing . UPDATE 2: The Volokh Conspiracy and Sullivan have now posted on this. (But you read it here at Internal Monologue first!) Story seems to have touched a nerve. I think everyone can empathize with a guy in prison for life who has had one of his few sources of richness and pleasure taken away. Punishing people who are already helpless just seems awful, no matter no matter how much they deserve it. Question: does putting people in prison really reduce crime, or does it just push crime into a hole where most of us don't have to deal with it? ...and I say give it to him! Yes, he was convicted of 1st degree murder, but when you take his D&D stuff away , I'm on his side: MADISON, Wis. - A man serving life in prison for first-degree intentional homicide has lost his legal battle to play Dungeons and Dragons behind bars. Kevin T. Singer filed a lawsuit against officials at Wisconsin's Waupun prison after a p

If the typical furry is a humanoid being with a animal head, then these are sort of reverse furries : Question: Were the ancient Egyptians furries? I'm not the first one to have pondered this .