President Obama said he invited Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley to the White House for a beer, presumably to have a laugh about this racial and/or class flare-up about wrongful arrest and hissyfittedness in Cambridge. The more important question than whether this will result in some racial breakthrough, for beer connoisseurs at least, is: What Kind of Beer Will They Drink? (UPDATE: Gates has said yes — he’d be willing to have a beer with Crowley as Obama suggested.) It’s...

The Pew Research Center has a very interesting new survey on attitudes toward gun control and abortion after President Barack Obama took office. Within the space of a year, views that were once firmly in the majority for both gun control and broadly-legal abortion are now nearly neck-and-neck – and it’s not just the choir getting preachier: The balance of opinion among independents has changed substantially over the past year. In April 2008, a majority of independents (56%) said it was...

A week after Miss USA runner-up Carrie Prejean started a national conversation about whether it’s wrong to say something plainly, with no shades of nuance – “I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman,” the verbal version of the Prop 8 vote tally and our president’s personal belief – Prejean’s preamble is still drawing harangues over its accuracy. She said: I think it’s great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. We...

As President Obama’s liberal base gets impatient with his moderate moves, he may be tempted to drop a nuclear policy bomb sure to draw gratitude from activists: actively push Congress to send him the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), as he promised to sign in a widely-shared Planned Parenthood speech. The bill is basically an abortion time-warp, returning the country back to the early days after Roe when states hadn’t yet tried to apply abortion restrictions. FOCA would write Roe into...

The two most tired phrases of 2008 got a makeover at the March for Life in Washington Thursday, where pro-lifers used the new president’s rhetoric to argue for an overhaul of the federal stranglehold on abortion policy for the past 36 years. It surely didn’t compare to the million-plus at the inauguration Tuesday, but the crowd was fairly packed as evidenced by my failed attempts to break through to the north side of the Mall as marchers started for the Supreme Court. The basics seemed...

It’s not a stretch to say that ex-President Bush has carried himself with the utmost dignity in his final two months in office – going beyond what previous outgoing administrations have done for the new guy. From expediting security checks for now-President Obama’s nominees to giving him national security briefings in Chicago, the Bush team gave the new administration everything it needed to hit the ground running. So far, no reports of the letter “H” missing from...

Barack Obama tried to patch things up with the predominant Democratic dynasty today, lunching with Bill Clinton near his Harlem office before going to his joint appearance with John McCain at ground zero. If the food was any guide of Obama’s future as a candidate and president, the mushy middle is where he’s headed. The lunch menu, according to the campaign, was a choice of sandwiches and flatbread pizza from Cosi, plus salad. Beverages were not specified. For those unfamiliar with the...

The latest McCain-Palin ad, on TV and their e-mail list to supporters, implies that FactCheck.org blamed the Obama campaign for “completely false or misleading” rumors about Sarah Palin. Curious to see what this report was, I visited FactCheck, associated with the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and saw they didn’t appreciate the campaign’s creative interpretation of their report: There is no evidence that the Obama campaign is behind any of the wild accusations that we critiqued....

John McCain just found his new attack dog, and I think we’ll all want to get bitten. When McCain first announced Sarah Palin, I thought she was a terrible choice, imagining some grizzled old Alaskan woman who would serve as a poor Hillary substitute. A week later, I’m pretty close to convinced that Palin is a huge asset to McCain, precisely because she is his Obama, just as Joe Biden is Obama’s McCain. The tickets are even, and Democrats are furious that Republicans have someone...

Families of victims of the 9/11 attacks aren’t thrilled with Rudy Giuliani’s heavy emphasis of his service on that fateful day in his campaigning, which will include a trip to Ground Zero. This was news last week but it’s getting renewed attention here in Washington, because the Pentagon 9/11 memorial is coming along and some families visiting the site think he’s crossing the line. Giuliani is politicizing a shared national tragedy, and he should stop immediately, they said...

Tonight was the Society of Professional Journalists’ Washington DC chapter awards ceremony, the “Datelines” (my “Journys” suggestion received no laughs), a well-meaning but overlong paean to a few journalists’ lifetime of service and an exercise in category domination by a hand-and-a-half-ful of D.C. outlets that cared to submit their work. We were our usual selves – long-winded, obliviously chatty while others spoke, and with the exception of the well-paid,...

So John McCain picked a campaign manager (in)famous for creating an ad with an imagined encounter between soon-to-be-ex-congressman Harold Ford, who is black, and a white Playboy bunny. It’s been tarred by not only a lot of liberal bloggers as a racist ad, but for some reason I can’t divine, the the original Moderate Voice himself: This hire will not be hailed by: Those who want to see an end to ads (that raise the issue of race, sexism or religion used even in the typical plausible-deniability...

Shaun’s post on the coming media circus surrounding Mitt Romney’s likely run for president as the first serious Mormon (properly speaking, “LDS”) candidate is generating some upset comments from the LDS faithful who appear to not like the posting of people in the temple underwear. The most extensive response is by LDSer Guy Murray, calling the underwear shot “denigrating.” Others are pointing to Joe’s comment policy as grounds for removal. I weighed in...

If you’re pondering whether a movie monikered after the charismatic primary contender for the 1968 Democratic nomination – but that features him for a total of maybe 20 minutes – can be any good, I have an answer – and it ain’t pretty.

A band from my college days is making waves for suing its label over the way it was marketed, and it implicates the nature of “contemporary Christian music” (CCM) itself. Mute Math grew out of Earthsuit, a hard-to-define alt-rock group with reggae, rapcore and electronica elements that mixed together unbelievably well. Of course, as a band full of Christian guys that spoke of their faith (albeit ambiguously) on their debut, they got picked up by EMI’s Sparrow label for Christian...

Do you get a creepy feeling from normal businesses that operate religious-themed dating websites? Perhaps this is of no concern to anyone else, but I’ve seen ads for these sites – along with a barrage of forgettable secular websites – all over the Internet, which either means they haven’t blown through their startup cash yet or they’re (gulp) actually making money from people of faith. My thoughts are on my own website here.

Since my role at TMV has developed into occasionally questioning the points made by the other bloggers here, who mostly fall left of center, I’ll answer Joe’s glib take on an interview Donald Rumsfeld did with Rush Limbaugh. I have no doubt, as sourced blogger Boston Progressive says, that “Rush is not going to ask any questions that are off-script” with Rummy. That’s what his audience wants, since they largely sympathize with the embattled defense secretary (unlike...

Georgia Rep. Cynthia McKinney got some fresh publicity when she apparently hit a Capitol Hill police officer who tried to stop her from entering a House building when he didn’t recognize her. It seems like an honest mistake, given that McKinney doesn’t get much face time on the cable nets and she’s even farther left, more anti-Jewish and paranoid than California’s Maxine Waters, but she’s blaming it on racism. Take it from a guy who hangs around the Capitol quite a...

Just as Will Smith donated his found money to the neighborhood kid on Fresh Prince to go to basketball camp, instead of giving it to charity, so too do promising individuals need the occasional financial boost, amid the huddled masses of poor at home and abroad that need our sympathy and open wallets. In that spirit, consider donating to aspiring screenwriter and novelist Jeremiah Lewis’s hard drive fund, to replace his laptop’s recently departed unit. I only met Jeremiah because our...

Cross posted at The Smoking Room The war on smoking seems to be spreading to those forms that are casual and infrequent, like Arabic water pipes (hookahs): “There’s a myth that the smoke is filtered by the water,” says Thomas Eissenberg, a psychology professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and co-author of a hookah study. The smoke passes through gurgling water before the user inhales it, but, he says, “Every risk of cigarette smoking is also associated with water pipes.” But...

My recurring fantasy is to open a bohemian, snooty coffeehouse in the DC area where I currently live, but this horror story from a New York couple who opened their own little cafe has given me pause.

Cross posted at The Smoking Room Good for them. There’s no given figure for how many editors refused to work Thursday after three top editors’ firing for criticizing the government – all Chinese media is state-controlled – but it’s a relief to know that conscience occasionally overwhelms conformity in such a society. Background: The Beijing News broke the news of a bloody crackdown in June against protesting farmers in the northern city of Dingzhou that left six dead....

I absolutely love piano rocker Ben Folds, having seen him a couple years ago in Oregon on his solo tour. But he appears to have lost all good judgment, agreeing to play a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s re-election campaign. The wisdom of boycotting artists with loudly-expressed political views you dislike aside, it’s just a dumb idea for artists to get involved in politics beyond issue advocacy here and there. U2’s Bono has served as a model for how an artist should participate...

American blogger Michael Totten, living in Lebanon for several months to give a first-person account of its politics, society and government, is handing off the blog reins to a Lebanese blogger as Totten heads to Cairo, where Internet access (unlike Lebanon) may be spotty. The Lebanese blogger, who shall remain anonymous, usually writes for other Lebanese, so this will be different. The blogger is a self-professed moderate, making me wonder if our patron Joe isn’t moonlighting in his spare...

Bioethics writer Wesley J. Smith notes some Europeans are growing worried their rationed health care programs might devolve into excuses for euthanasia by governments that want to avoid caring for the most vulnerable – and expensive – patients: Soon euthanasia might be the price the solidarity principle of the welfare state imposes on those people whose health care is costing society the most. Politicians in Belgium and the Netherlands have already granted their citizens a “right...