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...

For one night, congressmen frequently at each other’s throats slapped each other’s butts instead for a charity game of flag football, in the rain and mud, against the Capitol Police to raise money for the cop’s Memorial Fund. And they fought their bigger, younger, more athletic underlings to a tie! I’d rather hear this banter than the mindless paeans to “my friend” followed by rhetorical knives in the back: Along with the hits and slips in the mud, there was...

Cross posted at The Smoking Room If you’re interested in medical ethics surrounding assisted suicide, quality of life and such, two great sources for such news and commentary are Slate’s Will Saletan and bioethics writer Wesley J. Smith. The latter points out that assisted suicide has been carried out on the non-terminally ill — with their representatives sometimes lying to get around terminally-ill requirements in national laws — and we shouldn’t be surprised: After...

A new “luxury” wireless phone service is coming, from a Beverly Hills-based startup with an “industry-leading parent company.” The company is emphasizing quality of service and superior technical support, but it seems more likely to me this service will become a status symbol for spoiled celebrities that will overtake Sidekick-chic. Analysis here.

Cross posted at The Smoking Room Fox is cancelling “Arrested Development,” only the funniest sitcom since Seinfeld, because the idiot suits at Rupert’s network couldn’t figure out how to sell it. They gave it a sh—y time slot the first season (9:30 Sunday), moved it up last season (8:30) and now, finally, it has the lead it deserves (8, albeit on Monday). They preempted it for a month for the baseball postseason. The promos for the show are ludicrous – making...

Cross-posted at The Smoking Room How did I miss the bourgeois backlash against the prom? I didn’t go to mine – fitting the stereotype of a nerd with low self-esteem and parents barely cracking middle-class – but I had no idea there was a confluence of Catholic moralists and ex-hippie parents spouting anti-materialist shtick to keep their kids out of limos and fully dressed: In September, the president and principal of Kellenberg Memorial High School, a Catholic school in Uniondale,...

Has the right to abort a child determined to be disabled from prenatal testing morphed into the duty to abort any child with visible disabilities? Former Washington Post bureau chief Patricia Bauer told her personal story with her Down syndrome daughter Margaret, and the hostility she has encountered for carrying her daughter to term. She’s calm but unremitting in criticizing the oft-encountered view that her daughter is “less than human” and “a drain on society” –...

New research suggests that pluripotent stem cells – the kind that can develop into multiple tissues – might be found in amniotic fluid. This adds to placentas and a patient’s own tissues as sources of cells that can be grown to use in treatment for diseases such as various cancers, and are actually in clinical trials now (as opposed to those better-known stem cell sources). But the amniotic fluid news was only reported in Chicago’s right-leaning Sun-Times, unlikely to penetrate...

Cross posted at The Smoking Room The younger Bush is becoming more like Poppy in his look-the-other-way, realpolitik refusal to cut foreign aid to all but 3 governments – Myanmar, Cuba and North Korea – on the State Department’s list of 14 that have done squat to limit trafficking in prostitutes, child sex workers and forced laborers: Of those 14, Bush concluded that Bolivia, Jamaica, Qatar, Sudan, Togo and the United Arab Emirates had made enough improvements to avoid any cut...

Reason’s Hit & Run blog has the strange story of how WorldNetDaily, that early bastion of populist conservatism, managed to pressure a publisher to drop a book on ancient same-sex relationships, based on the abstract of a single chapter: WND apparently regarded the chapter in question as propaganda for pedophiles because it suggested that hybrid lover/mentor relationships between ancient Greek adults and adolescents might not have been horrifically scarring to the latter. First, even...

Cross posted at The Smoking Room “I need a break from domestic politics. So I’m setting out to write about The World instead.” So says Portland blogger Michael Totten, announcing he’s moving to Beirut for six months, where he visited to meet the Lebanese revolution shortly before Syria pulled out: The first places I’m going to visit after I secure my apartment are the very places the State Department tells me not to go anywhere near: Hezbollah’s militarized...

Iraq the Model passes along Al Arabiya’s report that a group in Iraq is threatening chemical attacks if Iraqi and American troops don’t withdraw from the Tal-Afar region. Omar says, “It’s worth mentioning that this terror group was mentioned in the news for the 1st time after they claimed responsibility for the mortar attacks on the shrine of Imam Kadhum on the same day of the tragic stampede on the Aima bridge in Baghdad.” Let’s hope this doesn’t pan out.