Kevin Drum

QUOTE OF THE DAY….From Hank, explaining the tech industry in a nutshell: “As a matter of fact, the last one was a classic cc:all flame fest over text editors.” If you don’t get it, it’s probably a clue that you have a life.

TRIGGER HAPPY….This is weird. I missed this nugget buried deep in Seymour Hersh’s July piece in the New Yorker when I first read it, but it turns out that our little run-in with those Iranian boats earlier this year sparked some conversation in the White House: [A] lesson was learned in the incident: The public […]

YOU AND YOUR DOCTOR….Tyler Cowen says that one of the reasons for rising healthcare costs is that people object to any limits on the amount of care they can get. Matt Yglesias demurs: While people will naturally always want “all the care they want,” people’s desire to obtain health care is large part a result […]

CULINARY DELIGHTS….Tomorrow Marian and I are going to the Orange County Fair, and we all know what that means: lots of deep fried food. If Elina Shatkin in the LA Times is to be believed, our best bet is to start off with deep-fried apple fries as an appetizer, move on to deep-fried Spam™ accompanied […]

CONSPIRACIES….According to a poll done to publicize the new X-Files movie, the #1 conspiracy theory (in Britain, anyway) is the belief that Area 51 exists to investigate aliens. I don’t buy their claim that a full 48% of Britons believe this, but whatever. All in good fun etc. etc. But down at #10, we get […]

JOHN McCAIN’S “PALPABLE PAIN”….From Todd Purdum’s profile of John McCain in Vanity Fair today: But irrepressible candor has always been McCain’s irresistible force, and its embers still burn bright. In Sparks, Nevada, this week, when a grouchy older man responded to McCain’s support for an immigrant guest-worker program by saying the United States needed to […]

HALFTIME REPORT….“Joe Klein vs. the Neocons” is nicely summarized here by Todd Gitlin. Click ‘n read if you haven’t been following this soap opera and want to catch up.

DOG WHISTLES….Newsday’s John Riley, after watching John McCain’s latest ad montage linking Barack Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, is perplexed by his choice of celebrities: Anyone with even a vague sense of pop culture knows that Britney and Paris are yesterday’s news. Here’s a link to Forbes’ Celebrity 100. Paris and Britney don’t […]

THE CONSERVATIVE WAR ON CONTRACEPTION….Here’s the latest front in the conservative war on contraception: a proposed regulation that would strip federal funding from any healthcare organization that doesn’t allow workers to opt out of providing abortion services to patients. This wouldn’t have a big impact on actual abortions, of course, since anyone who’s pro-life wouldn’t […]