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.

Cross posted at The Smoking Room If this won’t make you a libertarian, nothing will. The city of New London, Connecticut, whose successful attempt to confiscate private land for private use was confirmed in the Kelo case, is trying to collect rent going back 5 years from the property owners they molested. C’mon, Congress, you know you want to act rashly and pass a feel-good law for your constituents. Get it out of your system (for about 5 minutes) with this case!

If you’re jonesin’ for some snarky blogging on the Teen Choice Awards, you may want to see a therapist – or read my live-blogging as a mid-20s professional trying to reclaim his adolescence.

Cross posted at The Smoking Room Wesley J. Smith points to some very interesting results from the latest Pew poll on attitudes toward life issues: assisted suicide, stem cell research, and for some, the raison d’etre for the Supreme Court, abortion. Smith notes that support for assisted suicide is far below estimates from its leading proponents – 44% with the neutral poll question, 51% with the the personal-empowerment wording. He points out there’s no breakout on stem cells...

After more than a decade of strategizing how to fight the next Supreme Court justice, NARAL seems to have blown its wad prematurely (an analogy its activists can surely understand). The group’s savage ad against John Roberts – saying his views excused violence against abortion clinics – left a bad taste in the mouths of many Democrats, who are wondering if anything can stop this genial but principled nominee: The committee’s senior Democrat, Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont,...

I thought she was doing that VH1 reality show, but I guess her network-hopping matches her boudoir activities. (For confused link-clickers: It shouldn’t be a thinker’s joke.)

Cross posted at The Smoking Room It had all the makings of a great movie – a young graduate travels to Namibia on a journalism internship, hoping to reconnect with her father in his native land. She anchors the evening news several times and retraces the exile of the country’s first president through the countryside – where, unlike the city, malaria-infected mosquitos are plentiful. The nets don’t keep them all out, and she dies weeks later attending a journalism convention...

Guess who’s near the top of the request list for books among prisoners at Guantanamo: Lori, who for two years has overseen the detention center’s library, said J.K. Rowling’s tales about the boy wizard are on top of the request list for the camp’s 520 al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, followed by Agatha Christie whodunits. “We’ve got a few who are kind of hooked on it. A couple have asked if they can see the movie,” said Lori, a civilian contractor who asked...

Cross posted at The Smoking Room Hollywood’s use of marijuana in plot lines seems to be increasing, used regularly in several shows on basic and premium cable, and less so on Fox. There’s a groundswell of opposition from middle America on this issue…er, kinda: Hollywood’s embellishment of marijuana use is “irresponsible,” says Tom Riley of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy. Shows that tacitly approve of pot-smoking, particularly...

After reading some of John Roberts’ memos from the White House counsel’s office in the early 1980s, I have thoughts on him beyond his heartthrob status: I like him. Forget that he’s generally conservative, but apparently not a rigid ideologue, or particularly polarizing. He blames the Supreme Court for its own bitchiness in the 1980s: In early 1983, Mr. Roberts was asked to analyze a proposal pushed by Warren E. Burger, then the chief justice, to create a new, national-level...

Michael Totten looks at the largely ignored war against tourism in the Middle East, and the devastating economic effects it causes: Because of the region’s reputation in the West, it takes precious little. My hotel in Beirut was almost completely empty. My four-star hotel room was discounted by 75 percent in a desperate attempt to lure tourists back to the country. I don’t know how much money Lebanon’s tourism industry has lost since Rafik Hariri was killed, but it must be incredible....

Cross posted at The Smoking Room The opening of this story on a renewed federal push for a reporters’ shield law – protecting them under most circumstances from divulging anonymous sources – has one of the most inappropriate and sycophantic leads in a mainstream outlet I’ve ever seen: Watergate, the prisoner abuse scandal at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib jail, tobacco companies making cigarettes more addictive, and the Enron debacle – each of these instances of wrongdoing...

John Roberts, Supreme Court nominee! A “conservative non-ideologue”! I have no substantial thoughts on this guy – he’s been a government flack most of his career. But you can’t beat that name – what says America more than “John Roberts”? He could’ve been a pilgrim. I’ll also welcome his nomination because…he’s attractive. It’s been decades since someone really good-looking served on the High Court. Rehnquist –...

I don’t share this blogger’s contempt for the “MSM” (considering I’m part of it), and he’s quite partisan about it, but he gives a pretty good — and link-rich — history of the Plame/Novak/Rove matter, and what we know up to this point. It needs to be reiterated that until Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation is over, or someone involved leaks the direction he’s going, we have no idea what line of inquiry he’s pursuing. I think it’s...

Cross posted at The Smoking Room If you’re a fan of the Middle East Media Research Institute and the translations of Middle Eastern press they do, you might appreciate a relatively new site that translates media all over the world into English: The headline reads, “Columbus’ Discovery of America: History’s ‘Biggest Mistake.’ ” That might sound harsh to an American audience, but it’s less likely to ruffle Iraqis reading it in Arabic. Another zinger,...