Month: August 2008

A moose, her two kids, a garden and a sprinkler:

 

The devastating narrative pieced together in Jane Mayer’s must-read book, The Dark Side, has met with no response from the White House, credibly accused of war crimes. The conservative media have also shut out discussion of Mayer’s book. Some things are simply indefensible in public, I guess, even for the usual suspects. Jane’s take:

    There has been just plain radio silence. Though, I can say, I’ve actually heard from some of the sources. This book is not just based on talking to critics of the administration. It’s talking to lots of people on the inside: inside the White House, inside the CIA and the FBI and the military. And it’s been really gratifying. I’ve actually gotten some really wonderful phone calls from people who’ve said, “You know, you got it. Thank goodness someone told the story.” So that actually has really made me feel good.

Read the book. Your children will ask what you did to stop these people.

 

What a contrast with the GOP machine: it’s an entirely positive ad on energy issues. No mention of "celebrity" or the class warfare the Republicans are now adept at. Maybe this doesn’t work. Maybe he needs to run ads personally targeting and tarnishing McCain as McCain has against him. Or maybe this is the change we’ve been waiting for:

Seriously, guys, this rocks:

A reader writes:

Thanks for linking to the Out article.

Like the author and many men he knows, I found myself addicted to Manhunt (and silverdaddies) a few years back, going home and logging on and . . . waiting.  Staring at the screen.  Waiting for someone to want me (which is at the core of it).  But after years of being single and after tiring of this useless addiction, I determined that a committed, long lasting (lifetime) relationship is what I wanted.  I made the effort, and I found it. 

Being coupled is not easy. 

It’s much easier to just go online and play internet footsie with a dozen men, but everyone I know who fell into the online maelstrom was as repelled by it as they were attracted.  I’m much happier now, even with all the challenges that a relationship brings, than I was getting reassurances that I was hot at that moment or that someone I never met before and would never meet again wanted me for a few hours.  While the author may get some flack from the sexual libertarians, even they will know in their heart of hearts that quick sex cannot compare to waking up with someone you will wake up with until one of you dies.

I’m not sure that worrying about the psychic effect of online sex is anti-libertarian. I’m sure Michael Gross thinks it should be legal to do such things. Libertarianism does not mean refusing to understand the consequences of our choices in a free society. It’s about allowing those choices to take place.

Copenhagen, Denmark, 8 am.

If history is any guide, a landslide.

Here’s the latest t-shirt design from RedState:

Ross thinks it’s "(ahem) a joke," which it is. A harmless joke, given the legions of evangelical Christians waiting for the Rapture and convinced that only the Republican party represents the will of God? I guess it’s just as well that Ross thinks the religious right is entirely a function of the liberal media’s imagination. Just as David Brooks once did. After he strikingly didn’t.

Well, not exactly, but the Orwell Prize is running his diary chronologically online from the years 1938 to 1941, starting today, 70 years to the day after his first entry. Here’s the link.

His doctor’s letters have been published in the latest British Journal of Psychiatry. Jonah Lehrer has a fascinating discussion of it here. Money quote from the doc:

Vincent was above all a miserable, wretched man,… he would talk to me about complementary colours. But I really could not understand why red should not be red, and green not green!… When I saw that he outlined my head entirely in green (he had only two main colours, red and green), that he painted my hair and my mustache – I really did not have red hair – in a blazing red on a biting green background, I was simply horrified. What should I do with this present?

The painting below the fold: