There’s lots of pundit chatter on the topic these days… Steven F. Hayward remembers William F. Buckley Jr. and wonders is conservatism brain-dead? Today…the conservative movement has been thrown off balance, with the populists dominating and the intellectuals retreating and struggling to come up with new ideas. The leading conservative figures of our time are now drawn from mass media, from talk radio and cable news. We’ve traded in Buckley for Beck, Kristol for Coulter,...

More likely than not, that single hamburger patty or package you bought from the supermarket, restaurant or fast food joint contains “meat product” from hundreds of slaughtered cows gathered from around the world. One result of that practice is that major Class 1 (you could die) ground beef recalls are on the rise. Just this past August 825,769 pounds of Salmonella contaminated beef was recalled from Arizona, California, Colorado & Utah. Taking a page from Michael Pollan’s...

A long and interesting weekend read from SearchEngineLand, an interview with Eric Schmidt. I’m not through it yet. Here, some of Schmidt on newspapers: The number of readers for newspapers is declining. The market is becoming more specialized. There will always be a market for people who read the newspaper on a train going into New York City. There will always be a market for people who sit in in the afternoon in a cafe in the city and read the newspaper in the sunshine. The term “killing”...

Col. Om Prakash, author of The Efficacy of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, published in Joint Force Quarterly, an official Department of Defense journal published by the Chair of the Joint Chiefs: The law as it currently stands does not prohibit homosexuals from serving in the military as long as they keep it secret. This has led to an uncomfortable value disconnect as homosexuals serving, estimated to be over 65,000, must compromise personal integrity. Given the growing gap between social...

Jim Marone is chairman of the political science department at Brown and author, with David Blumenthal of the Harvard Medical School, of The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office. He was a guest this week on Radio Open Source: Health policy, Marone argues persuasively, lays bare the soul as well as the working temperament of presidents as almost nothing else does. Our presidents tend to be “sick men,” he writes, with complex medical histories and poorer health than American males...

The video: And extortion: A CBS News employee is under arrest for trying to extort $2 million from David Letterman, forcing the late-night host to admit in an extraordinary monologue before millions of viewers that he had sexual relationships with female employees. And arrest: In a statement late Thursday, the network said: “CBS was made aware of an ongoing police investigation involving David Letterman and an employee at ‘48 Hours,’ who was subsequently arrested earlier today...

Another Republican in the news for a tawdry affair. This one a retread: In acknowledging the affair [last June], Mr. Ensign cast it as a personal transgression, not a professional one. But an examination of his conduct shows that in trying to clean up the mess from the illicit relationship and distance himself from the Hamptons, he entangled political supporters, staff members and Senate colleagues, some of whom say they now feel he betrayed them. This major NYTimes investigation goes on for nearly...

I’m an American who didn’t brush his teeth until his late teens. And then only occasionally. I don’t remember using a toothbrush as a child. I do remember my parents bragging that my childhood dentist did not like kids; he took my siblings and me as a favor. That was no favor to me for that dentist did not believe in novocaine; and my parents did not believe in fluoride (they thought it was a communist plot). My reaction to his loud and slow dental drill leaves little wonder as...

Daniel Engber: Being fat can make you poor, and being poor can make you sick, which means that being fat can make you sick irrespective of any weight-related diseases. Fatness (or the lifestyle associated with obesity) also creates its own health problems, regardless of how much money you have—and health problems tend to make people poor, through hospital bills and missed days of work. So fat can be impoverishing irrespective of any weight-related discrimination. The point here is that sickness,...

Maybe Schiller got out just in time. John Koblin in the NYObserver: On Wednesday, Sept. 30, Arthur Sulzberger will host his annual “State of The Times” meeting for Times employees, which is generally a sleepy and awkward affair with lots of corporate cheerleading. (Last year, Mr. Sulzberger started the proceedings by playing a slideshow touting all of the paper’s accomplishments with Coldplay’s “Clocks” playing in the background. When the song ended, in lieu of applause, there was a deadly...

Yesterday I linked, in passing, to the Espresso Book Machine (video). The University of Missouri installed one last week. This week they’re reporting it raises copyright issues: The machine, which is not yet open to the public, is capable of printing any PDF file provided by the customer. This enables customers to print anything they desire, regardless of whether it is copyrighted. But there are parameters in place to avoid copyright infringement. “We will check everything submitted,”...

Lynn Sherr interviews Vivian Schiller, the first woman CEO of National Public Radio, at More.com (a site “celebrating women 40+”). Schiller’s been around — tour guide in the former Soviet Union, programming at TBS, documentary production at CNN and the head of NYTimes.com. Today, she says: I have the best job in the world. I’ve been in four positions since 1988, and each job I’ve had, I’ve thought, this is the best job ever. I’ve left each one reluctantly, only...

In last night’s hilarious piece on taser abuses, Stephen Colbert looks at the cases of a 76-year-old man driving a tractor in a Wyoming town parade who was tased five times for arguing over where the parade route ended (the officers were fired); a soccer mom tased in front of her kids for driving 50 in a 45 mph zone; and the “revolutionary new multi-shot” Taser X3 (”turn up your speakers,” the tacky Taser International website suggests). More seriously, Electronic Village...

The rejection adds to the litany of complaints against Apple’s incredibly successful third-party market for its popular smartphone: Apple rejected a free iPhone application that advocated a single-payer health system, calling the application “politically charged,” according to the app’s developer. Red Daly, a 22 year-old computer science grad student at Stanford, submitted his iSinglePayer iPhone app for Apple’s approval on Aug. 21. A little more than a month later Apple...

Tina Brown wants to speed up the publishing cycle of books: The Daily Beast is forming a new imprint, Beast Books, that will focus on publishing timely titles by Daily Beast writers — first as e-books, and then as paperbacks on a much shorter schedule than traditional books. On a typical publishing schedule, a writer may take a year or more to deliver a manuscript, after which the publisher takes another nine months to a year to put finished books in stores. At Beast Books, writers would be expected...

Really??? The trucking industry says these devices can be used safely, posing less of a distraction than BlackBerrys, iPhones and similar gadgets, and therefore should be exempted from legislation that would ban texting while driving. “We think that’s overkill,” Clayton Boyce, spokesman for the American Trucking Associations, said of a federal bill that would force states to ban texting while driving if they want to keep receiving federal highway money. The public wants a ban: Ninety percent...

My friend Sam, who lives around the corner, wrote earlier in the week, “Saturday night Babs Streisand is giving a one time only night at the Village Vangard where she got her start. Can you imagine?” It was her first time back to the club in 48 years: Max Gordon, late owner of the Village Vanguard, liked to tell the possibly exaggerated story of the “little pisher” who hung around the club in 1961, pestering him for a chance to perform. He flicked her away for weeks, but when his...

Bo Peabody in the WaPo: I launched the social networking site Tripod in 1995. By 1998, it was the eighth-largest site on the Web. But Tripod was never a successful business. Social networks aren’t great places to advertise. You can’t charge users for their services. And they never gain enough momentum to survive in the stock market. Indeed, no social network has ever made it as a public company. The standard social networking business model relies heavily on advertising. As millions...

Following up my Kurzweil Was Right post from the other day, The NYTimes today reports on an experiment testing whether electrodes implanted in the eye can restore sight. No miracle cure, and it doesn’t work for glaucoma, the artificial retina produces the sensation of sight. It draws on cochlear implants for the deaf and is partly financed by a cochlear implant maker: The project, involving patients in the United States, Mexico and Europe, is part of a burst of recent research aimed at one...

Philip B. Corbett, the NYTimes deputy news editor, is also in charge of The Times’s style manual. Says he: The folks at Adobe Systems Inc. remind us that “Photoshop” is a registered trademark referring to Adobe’s “digital imaging software products and related services.” It is not, they note, a generic term, and should not be used as a verb to describe the general process of digitally manipulating photographs. As usual in these cases, their proposed alternatives — for instance, “editing...

I have never been a believer in the value of flexible spending accounts. The Baucus Bill calls for setting a $2,500 annual limit on what people can set aside in an FSA, among other restrictions. Ron Leiber reports that “a not-quite grass-roots effort has sprung up, led by companies that administer flexible spending accounts,” to advocate for them. I’ve fought with one of those companies, SHPS, and still carry the raw animosity for it. With that I quote only Leiber’s discussion...

Trending on Twitter, Watch Out, Segway; Honda’s New Personal Transit Device Could Be Next Big Thing: It’s called the U3-X and most people think it looks like a space-age unicycle. And it’s actually fairly striking in its ability to move not just forward and backwards but sideways and diagonally, too. Top speed is 3.7 mph, which for most people would be a power walking pace. The device moves in whatever direction its user leans towards. The Brits are all over this… reports...

That dust storm that blanketed a huge swath of Australia also gave birth to an instant magazine: Strange Light is a 40-page magazine that Derek just published (in this case, I mean “just” as in “sometime during the night, U.S. time”) using MagCloud. So, to recap: The dust storm occurred on Wednesday. Photographers — professional and amateur — headed out into the storm and, with no organizing or pre-event planning, captured “a day in the life of a dust storm.” As people with digital...

In The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil predicts that by 2019 we will all be able to experience 3-D virtual reality through glasses and contact lenses that beam images directly to our retinas (retinal display). Coupled with an auditory source (headphones), we will be able to remotely communicate with other people and access the Internet. These special contact lenses (available also as eyeglasses) will deliver “augmented reality” and “virtual reality” in three different...

TPMDC’s Eric Kleefeld summarizes findings in a new national survey from Public Policy Polling: The poll found that only 59% of voters believe that President Obama was born in the United States, with 23% saying he was not, and 18% undecided. Among Republicans only, a 42% Birther plurality say he was not born here, 37% say he was, and 22% are undecided. As for the left, check out this question: “Do you think President Bush intentionally allowed the 9/11 attacks to take place because he...